“Keep moving, people! Don’t hold still for those lasers!”

Dolby and Jessop were down. Fitzgerald was down. Three other gun walkers scattered across the Temple platform all were struggling with overwhelming numbers of hostile machines. The Marines had now given up trying to provide cover for the walkers; there were so many alien fliers that every Marine had more than enough to handle just with the alien machines swarming around him or her.

A flight of black machines tumbled through the air toward Courtland. He snapped off three bursts from his laser, burning down two of the attackers but missing the third, which swooped suddenly, then slammed into his chest and exploded in a splash of black goo.

The impact staggered him back a step. He waved his arms wildly, uselessly, trying to shake or scrape off the liquid adhering to him.

Warning, his armor told him, the voice hammering in his head. Suit integrity compromised.

He was bleeding atmosphere. The good news was that the atmospheric pressure at Heimdall’s surface was less than half of what he carried in his armor, so his air mix was leaking out, and the ammonia and sulfur dioxide outside was not leaking in … yet.

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

Copyright © William H. Keith, Jr 2017

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover art by Gregory Bridges

William H. Keith, Jr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008121099

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008121105

Version: 2017-05-04

Dedication

For Deb and for Brea, bright lights illuminating my dark mind …

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Epilogue

By Ian Douglas

About the Publisher

Prologue

It thought of itself as the “Consciousness,” and it was very, very old.

How old? There was no way even it could know the answer. Billions of years, certainly, as certain organic life-forms measured time … and possibly older than that, through an eternity spanning trillions of years and several universes.

Only recently had the Consciousness emerged into this latest, young and vital, universe, following the tug of gravity across the dimensional walls of the metaverse, seeking the siren call of Mind. Indeed, advanced intelligence had left numerous traces in this universe, and the Consciousness intended to find and merge with that intelligence … and assimilate it, molding it to the Consciousness’s will.

They’d entered the universe through a patently artificial gateway, a rapidly spinning rosette of black holes that served to tear multiple openings through the fabric of spacetime. That artifact itself was the most obvious evidence of local advanced intelligence and technology. The so-called Black Rosette was located at the center of what appeared to be a giant globular cluster of 10 million stars, but which in fact was the stripped-bare core of an ancient dwarf galaxy cannibalized by the far larger barred spiral known to a few of its inhabitants as the Milky Way.

A billion years before, that dwarf galaxy had been occupied by a consortium of intelligent species, a bewildering mélange of alien bioforms. Most had … passed on—there was no better term for it—entering their version of a technological singularity that had removed them from the mundane cosmos of matter. A few individuals had remained behind, survivors of the singularity that had reorganized themselves into a new civilization calling itself Sh’daar.

Kapteyn’s Star had been just one of the suns of that lost dwarf galaxy, the home of a race that had chosen to convert itself wholly into digital format, uploading some trillions of individuals into a series of circuits and metallic channels etched into the very rocks of their home planet. There, they passed the eons at a vastly reduced pace, experiencing a second or two for every thousand years that flickered past on the outside, in effect traveling swiftly into their own remote future. Within their digitized universe, they experienced near-infinite virtual vistas, worlds far richer, more detailed, and more rewarding than anything the natural cosmos had to offer.

Or they had until now.

Because the Consciousness was enveloping their entire cosmos, slowing a part of itself down to more easily interface with the digitized natives, and beginning the process of relentlessly drawing them into itself.

Chapter One

12 October 2425

Approaching Heimdall

Kapteyn’s Star

0840 hours, GMT

A quintet of sleek, Pan-European KRG-17 fighters fell past Bifrost, the sullen, red-banded, ice-ringed gas giant named for the Rainbow Bridge of Norse mythology. Kapitanleutnant Martin Schmidt tried boosting the gain on the incoming scanner data, but the receivers were already maxed out. Static crackled and hissed in his in-head feed. Radiation effects from the planet? Possibly. Bifrost’s field storms could get pretty bad sometimes.

But Schmidt was pretty sure that the interference was from something else. Not the random, natural hiss of charged particles accelerated by Bifrost’s magnetic fields, but something deliberate …

“Adler Eins Zu Himmelschloss,” he called. “Adler Eins Zu Himmelschloss.”

Static shrieked in reply.

He tried again. “Eagle One to Skycastle, Eagle One to Skycastle, please respond. What is the tacsit at Heimdall now? We’re blind out here. Over.”

Still nothing.

“What’s going on back there, Kapitanleutnant?” Leutnant Andrea Weidman, Eagle Five, called to him. “Ghosts?”

Ghosts referred to the unidentified craft that had been appearing in this star system for the past month or so, first singly, but then in ever-increasing numbers. That they were spacecraft of some sort was undeniable … as was the fact that they represented an unimaginably advanced technology. All attempts to make direct contact with them, however, had failed so far.

“Possibly,” Schmidt replied. “That’s what we’re here to find out. Adler Flight … shift to stealth mode and arm weapons.”

The black surfaces of the fighters rippled and shifted as the craft adjusted their outer shapes from winged to teardrops. While not optically invisible, their hull nanoflage absorbed nearly every whisper of incoming radar pulse, every bit of light. Their environmental systems shifted into high gear as well, storing the rising internal heat rather than radiating it as infrared.

The five Pan-European fighters skimmed in beneath Bifrost’s system of broad, brilliant rings, each circle eerily reminiscent of the concentric grooves of an old-fashioned twentieth-century phonograph record. Kapteyn’s Star, the local red dwarf sun, was a bright red pinpoint shining through the rings, wan and distant. Three and a half astronomical units from the giant Bifrost, it contributed little light and less heat.

“Himmelschloss,” Schmidt called. “Do you copy?” The message was tight beamed and shielded, but Schmidt knew they would have to switch to radio silence soon.

Still nothing but static. Himmelschloss—“Sky Castle”—was the Pan-European monitor that had brought them here, to the Kapteyn’s system, now following a few hundred thousand kilometers astern and shielded from Heimdall by the vast, sullen, and storm-shrouded bulk of Bifrost.

“If it’s ghosts, Marty,” Leutnant Herko Dobrindt said over a private com channel, “we’re not going to be able to fight them. Not with these antiques.”

Schmidt had just been thinking the same thing. KRG-17 Raschadler fighters were a Franco-German design twenty years out of date and well past their prime. They were still effective space fighters—not as maneuverable as the latest North-American fighters, perhaps, but they carried the latest weaponry. Schmidt doubted, however, that even the most up-to-date KRG-40 Raumsturm would have a chance against those …

Whatever those flying things were.

An orange crescent appeared ahead, beyond the broad plane of the giant’s rings. The world was Heimdall, a moon the size of Earth, kept warm this far from its diminutive sun by tidal stresses with Bifrost. The surface temperature now was a few degrees below the freezing point of water. At one time, though, a billion years earlier—so the scientists had told them—Heimdall had been warm and Earthlike …

Heimdall, like its sun, was very old.

“I’m picking up ghosts up there,” Leutnant Gerd Heller announced. “My God, look at them all!”

“Record everything,” Schmidt ordered. “Everything.”

Bifrost appeared to be enveloped in a hazy, filmy light. At first, Schmidt assumed he was seeing the world’s aurorae—Heimdall’s strong magnetic field interacted wildly with the charged-particle storms swirling about Bifrost, and the world’s icy surface often was bathed in a lambent, electric glow—but a closer inspection showed that the glow was in fact caused by planet-girdling clouds: a haze of apparent dust motes at this range, but consisting of some trillions of discrete objects ranging from millimeters wide up to several meters or more across.

And … there was something more. A lot more. Dimly glimpsed, so faint that Schmidt thought that they must be a trick of his eyes, there were shapes. Huge shapes dwarfing Heimdall, dwarfing even massive Bifrost. From his vantage point, skimming along beneath Bifrost’s rings, it seemed as though Heimdall was suspended within a vast and far-flung web so insubstantial, so gossamer, it was difficult to tell if it was there at all.

And yet it was filling all of space ahead …

“Kapteyn Orbital,” Dobrindt said. “It’s gone!”

“We knew that,” Schmidt said.

“I mean there’s not even any trace of wreckage or debris. Something that big couldn’t have just vanished!”

No it couldn’t, Schmidt thought.

The station, a Stanford Torus housing more than 12,000 people, had been the principal base of the Kapteyn’s research colony, a Confederation facility built to study the enigmatic ruins on the moon it circled. Shortly after the arrival of the Rosette Aliens, six months ago, the base had been destroyed.

Or, at least, it had disappeared without a trace. Some still hoped it had simply been transported elsewhere.

Which meant the hopes for finding 12,000 Confederation personnel alive were fast dwindling. The heavy monitor Himmelschloss had deployed to the Kapteyn system to investigate.

Schmidt’s fighter jolted hard. His instrumentation showed what seemed to be ripples in spacetime, moving out from Bifrost. The static was growing stronger, too, as were the bizarre light effects, like aurorae engulfing all five fighters.

“Okay, Adler Flight,” Schmidt called. “This is where we part company. Maintain radio silence. I’ll … see you on the other side.”

“Good luck, Marty,” Dobrindt replied. “Going silent …”

The other four craft, nearly invisible even at this range, slowed, then dropped astern. Schmidt’s fighter continued drifting ahead, everything shut down now except for life support—struggling to control the fast-rising onboard temperatures—and passive scanners. No one knew if the alien ghosts would be able to track the fighter or not … or if they even cared. They appeared to be completely aloof to mere humans. But better safe than sorry.

Schmidt had volunteered for this, back on board the Himmelschloss during their voyage out from Earth. His chances seemed a lot more slender now, here in the blackness as he hurtled toward the light-enveloped moon ahead. The vast bulk of Bifrost dwindled steadily astern and he emerged from the shadow of the rings into wan, reddish starlight. His sensors could no longer detect the other Adler Flight ships, lost now in the radiation and magnetic fields encompassing the gas giant.

Schmidt felt alone—alone and lost in a way he’d never felt before, even when his partner of twenty-some years had left him a decade before.

I’m not going to survive this, he thought. But it was no good dwelling on that. Quickly, he thoughtclicked a series of in-head icons, compressing all of the data he’d acquired so far into a nanosecond burst. Fired in a tightly coherent pulse aft toward the other fighters, it might not be picked up or recognized by the aliens ahead … but who the hell knew what they were capable of?

Time passed. Once each minute he dispatched another nanosecond radio burst. All the while, the array of shifting lights, the weirdly interpenetrating patterns, the mysterious structures and shapes all spread until they filled the sky, with the moon at the glowing heart of the phenomenon. He magnified the images, zeroing in on the activity both on the surface and in orbit. Kapteyn Orbital was definitely gone; not even dust remained.

Twelve thousand researchers …

As the dark and silent teardrop streaked across Heimdall’s sky, the ghosts appeared to have taken notice. Schmidt was first aware of them as a stream of glowing motes rising from Heimdall’s surface, and he thought of a cloud of fireflies.

And there was something else moving out from the light-shrouded moon. Something huge.

“Mein Gott …”

He heard the cloud pelting the external hull of his ship, felt the jolt as they began dissolving the nanomatrix.

He was screaming as the hull of his fighter began to dissolve under the swarming assault.

26 October 2425

Watergate Convention Center

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

2015 hours, EST

The diplomatic reception was in full swing, with well over a thousand physical attendees standing about in knots of color and formal dress. Others were present virtually, their holographs showing only a faint translucency to give away the fact that they were projections of people from all across the Earth and, in many cases, beyond.

Alexander Koenig, the current president of the United States of North America, stood in the Watergate’s Grand Gallery, with its floor-to-ceiling curving transparencies slowly rotating through 360 degrees across D.C.’s nighttime cityscape. The Grand Gallery, enclosed beneath a stadium-sized dome nearly two hundred meters across atop its forty-story tower, was crowded with dignitaries—politicians and military officers and social luminaries from around the globe, all of them gathered here to celebrate the simultaneous reopenings of the Pan-European embassy here in D.C. and the USNA embassy in Geneva.

And—just incidentally—they were here to celebrate, at long last, peace.

The throng dazzled in light and color. Costumes ran from military full-dress to liquid light to quite fashionable nudity, and nearly everything in between. President Koenig wore a rather severe two-tone gray dress jumpsuit with the presidential seal just above the formidable holographic display of his military ribbons. His personal security detail hovered close by, anonymous in black utilities and opaque helmets. Koenig smiled as those helmets turned to closely scan Generalleutnant Reinhardt Kurz as he approached the president. Evidently the Pan-European officer passed inspection, because the detail let him through.

Here it comes, Koenig thought, turning to greet the general.

“Mr. President?” the man said quietly, speaking English rather than through a translator. “I have … news.”

A half dozen journalism drones hovered nearby, reminding Koenig that he needed to watch what he said. Hell, he always needed to watch what he said … one of the antiperks of political office. But something about Kurz’s tone made it clear this needed to be private.

Koenig glanced again at the drones, then thoughtclicked a command on his in-head security menu. It alerted his security team that the current conversation was private and that nearby news drones should be blocked.

President Koenig already knew most of what the Pan-European general was about to tell him, but when it came to international politics, it always paid to be careful about revealing the depth of your knowledge … and the accuracy of your intelligence sources.

A confirmation light winked within Koenig’s consciousness, and he nodded at Kurz. “Go ahead, General. We can speak freely.” The drones were already drifting in different directions, looking for other news bytes to record and transmit. He knew that a few would be hovering at the periphery of his awareness, though, watching for the opportunity to record again.

Kurz drew a deep breath. “Sir, Kapteyn Orbital has been destroyed. We have confirmation. There is nothing left.”

“Son of a bitch,” Alexander Koenig replied with what he hoped was a convincing demeanor.

“At least ten Americans were on the orbital when it … vanished,” Kurz added. “Their names have been turned over to your state department.”

“Thank you, General.”

The man shrugged. “The least we could do, Mr. President.”

They stood side by side for a moment next to that part of the gallery’s transparency that currently overlooked the Potomac River and Roosevelt Island to the west. Beyond, a few lights showed against the darkness … but much of Northern Virginia was still mangrove swamp and tidal flat. Until quite recently, the entire D.C. area had been a part of the Periphery, lost to the United States of North America, most of it flooded by rising sea levels centuries earlier. Soon, though, nanufactories would be working out there, growing new arcologies from rock, dirt, and rubble.

Once a historic hotel complex on the river’s eastern shore, the original Watergate buildings had long ago collapsed into the rising tidewaters that had swallowed much of old Washington. That had been during the dark years of the late twenty-first century, when large stretches of the coastline of the then United States had been abandoned to rising sea levels and storm surges. Under Koenig’s administration, however, many of the abandoned Periphery regions at last were being reclaimed. The D.C. mangrove swamps had been drained, and a system of levees and dams had been constructed to keep the city from flooding again. The buildings were being regrown by nanotechnic agents programmed and released into the freshly revealed mud and rubble. Where possible, historic monuments and edifices had been renovated or rebuilt, but most of the buildings were completely new, as was the city’s overall layout. Whereas the original city had been drafted by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the new plans were the work of Frank Lloyd WrAIght, an artificial intelligence already well known for its restoration work on Columbus and in the Manhatt Ruins.

As the dome smoothly rotated, new vistas slid into view. To the south and east, the newly regrown city soared and gleamed, ablaze with lights. The population was still small—fewer than fifty thousand had moved back so far—but Koenig was more than confident that it would grow.

If anything, there are always those who want to be as close to the seat of power as possible. He shook his head at the cynical thought.

No—this is a time for optimism. A fresh start after the Confederation destroyed Columbus.

We’re literally creating a new world for ourselves. He looked over at the man who should have been his enemy, and prayed his hopes were not unfounded.

After a long moment’s silence, Kurz looked uncomfortable. “Herr Koenig, I’m not sure how to ask this …”

Koenig had been fully briefed on the Confederation request. Since the massive cyber attack on the Genevan computer net months before, there were precious few Pan-European secrets to which USNA Intelligence was not privy. “I find the direct approach is generally the best,” he said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I won’t find it that shocking.”

“It is our intent,” Kurz said carefully in his heavily accented English, “as soon as may be possible, to send an expeditionary force to Kapteyn’s Star. We want to look for survivors, if any. We have reason to believe there may be such … on one of the inner planets of that system.”

“I see …”

“We also want to establish contact, if possible, with the Rosette entity.”

Koenig smiled. His advisors had told him that when the Pan-Europeans made their request, he should put them off, that he should say that he would have to consult with his staff.

“Of course, Herr Generalleutnant,” he said instead. “We would be most happy to take part in your expedition.”

Kurz looked at him sharply. “I’m surprised, Mr. President. Gratified, but surprised! Don’t you need time to discuss this with your people?”

“Not really. I was already aware of much of what you’ve just told me. I’m sure you knew this already.”

“Well … yes …”

“And you will also know that I don’t like games, political or otherwise.”

“I can appreciate that, Mr. President.”

Koenig glanced around, then pulled up a finder map on his in-head feed. He was in this throng somewhere … ah! There.

Gene? Koenig called, sending a mind-to-mind call. Get your ass over here.

On my way, Mr. President.

Admiral Gene Armitage separated himself from a small mob on the other side of the huge room and made his way toward Koenig and the Pan-European general. Head of Koenig’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Armitage was his principle military advisor and the man who would get the ball rolling in the planning of any new military operation.

“Herr Generalleutnant Kurz … head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Armitage.”

“We’ve met. Admiral? Good to see you again.”

“At Geneva last month,” Armitage said, nodding. “A pleasure, sir.”

“We’re going to be sending a contingent with the Confederation to Kapteyn’s Star, Gene,” Koenig said. “Discuss the details with the general, please, and then make it happen.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Armitage’s expression remained shuttered, giving nothing away. Which was commendable, seeing as he’d been the one who’d recommended that Koenig not give the Pan-Europeans an immediate answer.

The biggest problem, Koenig thought, turning away and leaving the two to talk in private, was the fact that few in the USNA military trusted the Confederation yet. The Brits were okay; their defection during the war had accelerated the enemy’s disintegration as a coherent fighting force. The Russians, the North Indians … the USNA could work with them well enough. But the Pan-European destruction of the city of Columbus the previous year had left the USNA with a bitter taste in its mouth, and the fact that the attack apparently had been carried out by renegade elements within the Genevan government hadn’t made the bitterness easier to swallow. There were still many within the former United States who wanted to charge the Pan-Europeans, in particular, with crimes against Humankind.

That, Koenig reflected, isn’t going to happen. Behind-the-scenes deals cut by his administration before the public negotiations had guaranteed the Confederation immunity from war-crimes charges if they would agree to the peace talks. That strategy had been strongly urged by Konstantin, the powerful AI located on the far side of Earth’s moon. The USNA was clearly winning the short, sharp war against the Confederation, but they needed peace. They were in very nearly as bad a shape as the Pan-Europeans—worse, possibly, after major strikes against American soil—and with the looming advance of the Rosette Aliens, Humankind needed to come together in a united front now, at any cost.

Koenig didn’t always understand Konstantin’s logic, but this time it seemed straightforward enough. It still wasn’t clear that the Rosette Aliens were overtly hostile, but they had destroyed human ships and bases, and Humanity had to come before any petty geopolitical squabbles.

Especially since, in the background, the alien Sh’daar, time-travelers from the remote past determined to block Humankind from its approaching technological singularity, always lurked in ambiguous mystery. They’d agreed to a cease-fire with Earth … but for how long? Their long-term motives were still far from clear.

Shadowed by his four bodyguards, Koenig made his way to one of several bars set up on the slowly turning floor. They moved with a fluidity that betrayed an essential fact: presidential security was now handled by robots—in this case a quartet of human-looking androgynoids far faster, stronger, and smarter than anything modeled in flesh and blood. They could pass as human—very nearly—though the deliberate blurring of sexual characteristics gave them a touch of the uncanny valley effect. Like the old United States Secret Service, you could tell what they were by the fact that they constantly watched everyone in the room except for the person they were protecting.

Koenig ordered a jovian from the robotic bartender. One of the security bots closely scanned both the botender and the mirror-polished globe it passed to Koenig.

“Thank you,” he told the robot behind the bar. He glanced at the security machine and cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t worry. He’s one of yours.”

“Of course, Mr. President.” But it completed the scan anyway. Security was a lot tighter—and far more automated—since the Confederation strike at Columbus.

He wasn’t actually complaining.

“Mr. President,” a woman said behind him. “I haven’t had a chance to welcome you to D.C.”

Koenig turned to face Shay Ashton—Governor Shay Ashton, rather. Once a crack USNA fighter pilot, she’d retired to her home in the D.C. swamps, and ended up leading the defense of the ruins when the Confederation tried to claim some of the supposedly abandoned USNA Peripheries for themselves. She’d gone on to become interim governor for D.C. as it was formally reintegrated into the country, and was titular head of the territory now. There were rumors that she was going to be drafted as one of the D.C. representatives to Congress in next year’s general elections, though she’d not formally announced her candidacy.

He smiled. “Madam Governor! It’s good to see you again.”

Two of the security ’bots were giving her a very close scan, checking for weapons, explosives imbedded inside her body, anything at all that might be a threat. It was hard to see how she could be hiding much; she was wearing a holographic sheath of rippling light in greens and blues, with the image of the Freedom’s Star ribbon glowing above her left breast. An animated tattoo of a bright green butterfly opened and closed its wings on her right cheek.

She smiled sweetly at one of the machines. “See anything you like?”

“That will do,” Koenig told the machines. “I’ve known Ms. Ashton for a long time, and if she’s a threat, it’s definitely to the other guys.”

“Of course, Mr. President,” one said … but, as with the ’botender, they completed their scans.

“Machines,” she said. “I still can’t get used to them.”

“I know what you mean.” Actually, Koenig thought, he didn’t know what she meant … he couldn’t. Shay had been born and raised outside of the USNA’s comfortable high-tech envelope, where the locals had to farm and fish just to survive. She’d been exposed to advanced technologies, certainly—from robots to genetic prostheses to AIs to nano-grown cerebral implants during her tour in the Navy—but you really needed to have grown up with that sort of technology to get the most out of it. Even now, millions of people all over the country were Prims—Primitives—people brought up in the Peripheries, who didn’t have access to high tech, or who’d come to it later in life.

The expression on her face told him she’d caught him out, and he shrugged. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay, Mr. President.” Her right forefinger touched her forehead, her left the center of her sternum. “You’re almost there … thirty centimeters.”

He chuckled and nodded. Thirty centimeters—the distance between brain and heart. Knowing a fact was different from feeling it.

Koenig lightly squeezed the silver jovian in his hand, and the upper surface slid open, releasing a small, thick puff of greenish vapor. He inhaled, savoring the tingling rush channeling directly to his brain.

He smiled at Ashton. “Can I get you one of these? They’re good …”

“Thank you, no, sir. Prims have trouble with brainstimming, sometimes. I can’t handle the stuff.”

The green vapor consisted of clouds of nanotechnic units programmed to send waves of pleasurable sensations directly into the brain via the olfactory bulb. The sense of smell was the only one hardwired directly into the brain rather than through a long chain of nerves, and brainstimming gave a socially acceptable euphoric buzz without impairment or hangover. People who’d received their cerebral implants later in life, however, rather than as small children, could have trouble handling the storm of sensations, could become disoriented and might even pass out. Such, apparently, was the case with Ashton.

“Of course.”

“So we’re really going to go through with this, Mr. President? The new alliance, I mean?”

“It seems to be the best course for us. For Earth, I mean.”

“That’s assuming we can trust them.” She nodded toward General Kurz, now deep in conversation with Armitage.

“Well … yes.”

“Some of them wanted to sell out to the Sh’daar.”

“I know, Ms. Ashton. And to a certain extent I agree with you. But Konstantin says that we won’t survive another encounter with the Sh’daar if we don’t work with the Confederation … to say nothing of the Rosette Aliens. We unite, or we die. There is no middle ground.”

“Konstantin.” She made a face. “Another machine.”

“A machine some thousands of times smarter—and millions of times faster—than any organic brain we’ve encountered.”

“That’s right. Smarter … so smart we don’t know what it’s really thinking. Or what it’s planning for the future.”

He smiled. “Perhaps you’d like to sit in on the next meeting of my cabinet.”

She looked shocked. “Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to suggest—”

He waved her down with a gentle motion of his hand. “No, no. That’s okay. I was just picturing you tearing into Sarah Taylor, the secretary of Alien Affairs. Or Phil Caldwell. It might be fun.”

A USNA admiral in full dress approached them. “Do you need rescuing, Mr. President?”

“Not at all, Vince. The governor was just … questioning certain affairs of state.”

Admiral Vincent Lodge smiled at Ashton. “Maybe you need rescuing from him.”

“I think I can watch out for myself, Admiral.”

“Good.” He looked at Koenig, and some of the humor drained from his eyes. “Mr. President? A word, if I could?”

“Excuse us, Ms. Ashton?”

“Of course.”

They stepped aside. “What’s the word?”

“Mr. President … we’ve received a Konstantin intercept.”

Konstantin had intelligence connections imbedded all over Earth, and well beyond. Admiral Lodge was the head of Naval Intelligence … the human head, rather, since in many ways Konstantin was the true director of cyberintelligence. A Konstantin intercept meant that the AI had picked up a transmission of some sort, probably classified and definitely important, if Lodge was interrupting him at a party about it.

“Tell me.”

“A courier just dropped into normal space outside Neptune’s orbit and began transmitting. It’s from Kapteyn’s Star … from the Pan-European monitor they sent out there.”

“Go on …” Couriers were high-speed interstellar vessels, usually unmanned, that could make the Alcubierre passage between the stars much more quickly than larger, more cumbersome star-faring vessels. They wouldn’t have sent one if things weren’t critical.

“We know what the Rosettes are doing at Heimdall, sir. They’re waking up the Kapteyns. They may be assimilating them.”

“The Kapteyns!”

“Yes, sir. And for the first time, we just may have gotten a glimpse of what the Rosette Aliens are after.”

“You have my full attention,” Koenig told him.

Chapter Two

29 October 2425

TC/USNA CVS America

Admiral’s Quarters

0425 hours, TFT

Admiral Trevor “Sandy” Gray came awake in a darkened and empty room. Still half asleep, he clawed at the loneliness of the bed next to him. Where was she? It took him several moments to figure out where he was … his quarters on board the star carrier America.

Damn … it had seemed so real.

But then, it always did.

His partner in the erotincounter had been named Marie; for once she had not been Angela, his one-time wife, nor had it been his most recent partner, Laurie Taggart, who’d recently been transferred to the Lexington. Marie was pure fiction, created by one of America’s AIs, and very loosely based on a current sex-drama actress who went by the same name. In-head dramas, fed into people’s internal hardware, were a major source of both entertainment and education. Gray preferred interacting with electronic avatars to address his sexual desires, rather than sexbots. The sensations and results were the same … but the relationship played out inside his brain rather than in his bed. So when the illusion dissolved, so did the partner. The feeling was precisely that of waking from a dream, and that could leave you feeling empty and a bit lonely.

“Admiral Gray,” a voice whispered in his head. “Admiral Gray. Sorry to wake you, sir, but we’re coming up on the triggah.”

“Very well,” he replied. The voice was that of Eric Conrad, his new chief of staff. He sat up, stretched, and thoughtclicked the room’s lights to higher brightness.

Unlike a dream, the memory of his encounter with Marie hadn’t evaporated upon waking. The memories were written directly to his long-term memory; the human brain literally could not tell the difference between what happened within its network of neurons and what happened in the real world outside.

Somehow, that made the loneliness worse.

But it kept his sex life uncomplicated.

“How close are we?” he asked over the open circuit. He took a small capsule from a dispenser and slapped it against his naked chest. The nanomaterial turned semi-liquid with the shock and flowed swiftly over his body from neck to feet, solidifying in seconds into closely woven shipboard utilities, complete with rank tabs at the throat.

“Twelve thousand kilometers, sir,” Conrad replied. “We have battlespace drones out, and they’re sending back some good images.”

“Let me see.”

The bulkheads of Gray’s quarters went dark, then lit once more, showing a projection of surrounding deep space. Stars hung suspended in velvet blackness. Directly ahead, robot drones sent back images of the TRGA—the Texaghu Resch Gravitational Anomaly. From this aspect, it appeared to be a perfect circle, gray-rimmed, surrounded by a faint haze of dust and debris.

Properly known either as the Sh’daar Node or as the TRGA, the circle was in fact a hollow cylinder of ultra-dense matter twelve kilometers long and one wide, rotating about its long axis at close to the speed of light. Located over 200 light years from Sol, the TRGA—a “triggah” in Navy slang—was clearly artificial and clearly the product of an unimaginably advanced technology. There were others besides this one—tens of thousands, perhaps, scattered across the galaxy as a kind of spacetime transportation net. At one time, Earth Military Intelligence had believed that the alien Sh’daar had created the things; certainly they used them, as did human star-farers. But no one knew for sure who’d actually built them in the first place, not even the information traders known to Humankind as the Agletsch. They worked, and for most people, that was enough.

This particular TRGA was the first one discovered by human explorers, thanks to information provided by Agletsch traders. Just recently, it had been given the code name Tipler, after twentieth-century physicist Frank Tipler, who had worked out the math for Tipler cylinders—titanic, ultra-massive constructs that might allow travel across vast areas of space and even through time. The TRGAs had turned out to be related to Tipler cylinders, but inside out—rotating hollow tubes rather than solid cylinders—though the effect was the same.

Perhaps a dozen TRGAs were now known, all of them named for important physicists and cosmologists from the past few centuries.

Sometimes Gray wondered if they’d have been surprised to see their theories become reality.

The circle slowly grew larger in size as America and her supporting fleet approached it. That cylinder, Gray knew, held the mass of a sun the size of Sol somehow compressed into something akin to neutron-star material. Inside that fast-rotating shell, Jupiter-sized masses rotated and counter-rotated, stretching local spacetime beyond the breaking point. That haze was in part dust, and in part gravitational distortions in the space within which the triggah was imbedded.

And they were about to go through it.

“Fighter status?” Gray asked.

“VFA-96 is ready for launch, Admiral,” the staff officer replied. “Awaiting your word.”

“Launch fighters,” Gray replied. “And go to battle stations.”

He was already on his way up to America’s bridge as the battle-station alarms sounded.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0440 hours, TFT

“It’s too fucking early …” Don Gregory complained.

“There ain’t no day or night in space, youngster,” squadron commander Luther Mackey replied. “So no early or late. Deal with it.”

“It’s zero-dark thirty, Skipper,” Gregory replied, “and I haven’t had my damned coffee yet.”

“My … grouchy first thing, aren’t we?” Lieutenant Gerald Ruxton said over the tactical channel, laughing. He sounded … awake, Gregory thought. Disgustingly so. Bright, cheerful, and—considering the fact that he’d been in the ship’s bar drinking with him about five hours ago and was, therefore, just as short on sleep as he—

“Ice it down, people,” Mackey said. “Bearing one-seven-five by minus three-one. We’re clear for launch. America has cut thrust and is drifting. Fifteen hundred kps …”

Gregory’s SG-420 Starblade fighter absorbed the incoming data even as the skipper relayed it in staccato fashion. He could feel the flick and trickle of numbers downloading through his skull.

“Launch in three …” Mackey said, “… and two … and one … release!”

Mounted in the outer deck of the second rotating hab module, the fighters of Black Demon squadron, VFA-96, began sliding down their launch tubes, impelled by a half G’s worth of centrifugal force. Gregory was third in the queue; together with Lieutenant Bruce Caswell’s Starblade, he dropped into blackness, slowly drifting clear of the shadow of America’s massive forward shield cap, then rotated to align his craft parallel to the far larger star carrier. The ship was an immense mushroom shape nearly a kilometer long, its shield cap a hemispherical water reservoir four hundred meters across. Ahead, partially obscured by the shield cap, the perfect circle of the TRGA—blurred by rotation and by a fiercely twisted spacetime—hung suspended in the distance.

The remaining VFA-96 fighters dropped from the habmodule flight decks and took up station with the others, a flight of twelve Starblades already morphing into highvelocity teardrop shapes. Even in the vacuum of space, streamline counted for ships moving at close to c.

“America CIC, this is Point One,” Commander Mackey said. “Handing off from PriFly. All Demons clear of the ship and formed up.”

“Copy, Point One,” a voice replied from America’s Combat Information Center. “Primary Flight Control confirms handoff to CIC. You are clear for maneuver. You may proceed.”

“Okay, boys and girls,” Commander Mackey said, addressing the squadron. “Time to thread the needle. Initiate program.”

Tightly knotted gravitational singularities winked on just ahead of each fighter, dragging it forward as it flickered in and out of existence at thousands of times per second, accelerations building rapidly as America slid past the fighters, then began dwindling astern.

VFA-96 had drawn the short straw on this mission … flying point, leading America and her battle group into and through the huge, fast-spinning cylinder ahead. Gregory wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for this. Three months ago—or 12 million years in the future, depending on how one counted things—his fighter had been damaged, and he’d briefly been marooned on the surface of Invictus, a frigid rogue planet wandering the darkness beyond the galaxy’s rim. He’d lost his legs … and he’d lost Meg Connor, a woman he’d loved very much. The legs had grown back and he’d learned how to walk again.

But other wounds were a hell of a lot harder to heal.

He had to force his mind away from thoughts of Meg. The Black Demons had lost a lot of pilots at Invictus, and very, very nearly lost him as well.

Maybe, he thought, it would have been better if he had died.

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

0451 hours, TFT

“Admiral on the bridge!”

“As you were.” The call and the response were largely for tradition’s sake, since coming to attention in zero-gravity was more or less pointless. In any case, it would have been bad form to interrupt personnel working their consoles and links.

Gray entered the flag bridge, giving a gentle tug to pull himself along one of the tethers that roped different parts of the double bridge complex together. Parts of America, those within the rotating hab module section—mostly personnel quarters and the fighter launch and recovery decks—were under spin gravity, but the flag bridge and the adjacent ship’s bridge were located in a tower rising from the star carrier’s spine forward of the hab sections, and therefore in zerogravity.

He positioned himself in the command chair and let it tighten around his hips. He placed the palms of his hands on the seat’s contact plates, letting them connect with his neural interfaces. Datastreams began flowing through his brain, opening in-head windows and connecting him with the AIs running both the ship and the fleet.

There was no up or down in zero-gravity, of course, but from the vantage point of his command chair, he was looking down onto the ship’s bridge forward. The flag bridge formed a kind of gallery overlooking the ship’s command center, where he could see about a dozen officers and enlisted personnel working at their consoles under the watchful electronic gaze of Captain Sara Gutierrez. On the large curving bulkhead above the bridge entrance glowed a projection of surrounding space, with the blurred and perfectly circular ring of the TRGA centered dead ahead. Dwindling numbers to the side gave range and closing velocity.

“The Demons are going in,” the voice of Captain Connie Fletcher reported, whispering in his mind. She was America’s CAG, the officer commanding the various fighter and auxiliary squadrons.

“Tell them—” Gray stopped. He’d been about to wish them “Godspeed,” but that would have been less than appropriate. There were those who thought the TRGAs had indeed been constructed, eons in the past, by godlike aliens, and the White Covenant discouraged statements that might be interpreted as religious sentiment by others. “Tell them good luck,” he said. It might be a bit lame, but it shouldn’t offend anyone.

“Aye, aye, Admiral.”

Icons marking the twelve fighters of the Black Demon squadron appeared ahead, superimposed against the TRGA’s maw. And then …

They were gone.

Let me see the fleet disposition, Gray thought. The viewpoint pulled back from America, so that the star carrier could be seen from the side, in the distance. Other icons appeared strung out behind her. America was followed in line-ahead by the railgun cruiser Leland … and behind her came the alien Nameless. The Glothr, it seemed, didn’t name their ships, so the humans on the expedition had given the vessel a name of their own.

Not quite the most clever name, but there you go.

The fighters were through. Data began pulsing back … but broken and static-blasted. Communication across a TRGA gateway tended to be intermittent and unsatisfactory, requiring precisely positioned transmitters and receivers, as well as a great deal of power. There was enough to tell the battle group that the fighters had emerged, however, and apparently in the right epoch.

Fighter pilots called it threading a needle … a reasonable analogy. The interior opening of a TRGA was only slightly wider than America was long. Still, within the TRGA’s lumen, minute variations in position and velocity created wildly different pathways through space and time. The ships of the America battlegroup were following a carefully programmed and precise series of maneuvers as they entered the spinning maw.

“Okay, people,” Gray said softly. “All nav systems to automatic. Let the AIs take us through.”

The warning was unnecessary—more nervous reassurance than anything else. All twelve ships of Battlegroup America were being guided now by powerful artificial intelligences. Presumably, the additional ship, the Glothr Nameless, was guided by non-organic systems as well. Jellyware brains—even enhanced by AI implants—simply weren’t precise enough or fast enough to handle the variables successfully.

For a breathless moment, the star carrier America hung on the verge between one space and another …

And then unimaginable energies seized the vessel and dragged her in.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0458 hours, TFT

Something strange was happening to time.

The TRGA was just twelve kilometers long. Traveling at some twenty kilometers per second relative to the alien portal, Gregory should have been through and out the other side in six tenths of a second. It felt, however, like ten or fifteen seconds, an impossibly long time as the blurred gray walls of the tube swept past his ship, terrifyingly close. The slightest miscalculation, and his fighter would be shredded by contact with a wall moving at very close to c. Even if he didn’t hit that motion-smeared surface, a tenmeter drift in any direction would put him on a different spacetime trajectory … and the gods alone knew where he would emerge … or when.

Then the TRGA’s walls vanished, whisked away at twenty kps as Gregory’s fighter emerged into open space once more.

And this new space was extraordinarily crowded with stars.

“My God …” he breathed, awed. The White Covenant be damned—the phrase spoke to how he felt.

The Black Demons were moving through the central core of the N’gai star cluster … a dwarf galaxy just above the plane of the vast spiral of the Milky Way. The TRGA had brought them back through time as well—some 876 million years into their remote past. In this epoch, life on Earth was still confined to the planet’s seas and was only just then discovering that sex and genetic diversity were useful evolutionary ideas.

“Commsat away,” Mackey reported. The satellite would drift in front of the TRGA, recording all transmissions from the squadron. If anything happened to the fighters …

Gregory didn’t allow himself to think about that.

“We have company, Skipper,” he reported. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range three-zero-thousand.”

“Got it, Greg. All Demons, shift vector to zero-zero-five, minus two-one. Do not, repeat do not initiate hostilities …”

“Not unless they freakin’ initiate first,” Kemper added.

Gregory could see the oncoming alien spacecraft in an in-head display, picked up by his fighter’s long-range optics, magnified, and streamed through the craft’s AI into his brain. They were small, each only a meter or two across. They were oddly shaped, too, no two precisely alike. Perhaps more important, there were thousands of them in an onrushing cloud.

It did not look like a friendly reception.

And something was happening within that cloud of oncoming craft. Individual ships were shifting position, orienting themselves as though seeking to form some larger structure. Within his in-head, Gregory could see a series of rings, perfectly aligned, each a hundred meters across.

What the hell?

“Thirty thousand kilometers,” Mackey said. “We need to get …”

“Hostile incoming!” Lieutenant Cynthia DeHaviland yelled over the tactical link. “The bastards are firing!”

A tightly coherent bolt of energy struck Demon Six—Lieutenant Voight’s ship. The Starblade vanished in a cloud of white-hot vapor.

“Spread out and accelerate!” Mackey ordered. “Boost to five hundred Gs! Let’s close the gap!”

The eleven surviving Starblades hurtled forward, their velocity increasing by five kilometers per second each second. Ahead, the cloud of silvery objects continued to maneuver to organize themselves into a huge, indistinct structure. The energy bolt had come through those closely aligned rings, and Gregory’s long-range scanners were picking up evidence of a fast-building magnetic charge …

“It’s a particle cannon!” Gregory called as understanding gelled. “It’s a fucking particle cannon five kilometers long!”

Gregory wondered how they’d managed that trick … positioning individual spacecraft like pieces in a titanic puzzle, not touching physically, but apparently locked together by magnetic fields. He didn’t ponder it long, as another pulse of energy surged up through the floating rings and very nearly caught Lieutenant Caswell, who rolled clear just as the particle beam passed him.

“Spread out, damn it, spread out!” Mackey yelled. “Arm Kraits! Target the dense parts of that cloud!”

Each Starblade carried a full complement of thirty-two VG-92 Krait space-to-space missiles, plus six of the massive and more powerful VG-120 Boomslangs. Still, a total of 418 missiles of varying megatonnage, Gregory reflected, was not going to go very far against that vast and sprawling cloud of diminutive alien vessels.

They would have to make each shot count, taking great care in the placement of every one. By targeting the thickest regions of the alien spacecraft cloud, they would do the greatest damage with what they had available.

I hope.

“Fire!”

Gregory had already brought up the control icons for the first two Kraits in his magazine, arming both and setting their yields to a hundred megatons each. The alien swarm dominated an in-head window; he zoomed in on a dense knot of alien vessels—a part of the open architecture of the enemy’s immense particle cannon.

“Demon Four, Fox One!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Times two!”

Centuries before, the “Fox One” radio call had meant the launch of a heat-seeking missile. Now it meant a smart missile like the VG-92 Krait shipkiller, the Boomslang, or Fer-de-lance … or even the old-style Kraits, the VG-10s, now obsolete and considerably less competent in the AI department.

With his first two shots away, Gregory shifted targets, brought two more Kraits on-line, and loosed them. His primary tactical display was fast becoming an indecipherable mass of fighters, targets, and the slow-crawling contrails of missiles in flight. All of those contrails swung wide before angling in toward their targets, and their onboard AIs had them dodging and twisting to avoid enemy defensive fire, turning the display into a classic dogfighting furball. His AI could read the mess though, even if he could not. This allowed Gregory to focus his attention on maneuvering the Starblade, trying to make sure that it was not where the enemy was aiming and firing that colossal particle gun—

—which fired again, an instant before the first Kraits detonated in silent blossoms of white light … one blast after another, each equivalent to 100 million tons of high explosive.

Alien ships evaporated by the hundreds, caught between multiple expanding plasma shock waves and by intense bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Nuclear explosions were not nearly as effective in the vacuum of space as they were in an atmosphere, but the temperature at the heart of each blast still measured well over 100 million degrees. As the fireballs faded, large bubbles of emptiness were stitched through the mass of silvery spacecraft. The precise organization of the particle gun appeared to have been disrupted, and the remaining fragments of the structure dissolved as alien spacecraft abandoned it.

And then the Black Demon squadron was plunging into and through the cloud of alien ships. Bright red icons representing hostile targets filled his mental view of the surrounding starscape. Gregory lined up on one of the enemy vessels and triggered his own particle weapon, sending a beam lancing into the target with savage precision.

“Watch it, Demon Four!” Caswell called to him. “You’ve got two coming in fast behind you!”

“I see ’em.”

The two aliens dropped onto his six and he flipped his Starblade end-for-end, hurtling backward as he snapped off one burst of electric flame … then a second … and a third when one target evaded his attack and kept coming.

The Sh’daar fighters had teeth. A beam caught Demon Eight, a newbie named Romero, and ripped her Starblade in half. Gregory eased his fighter around and teamed with DeHaviland. Together, they vaporized another Sh’daar fighter.

“How long before the fleet comes through?” DeHaviland called.

“Don’t know, Cyn,” Gregory replied. “Should be any sec now!”

That wasn’t just wishful thinking. Fighter point missions weren’t intended to engage in long-term combat. The point element was intended to go ahead of the battlegroup, find out if there were hostiles ahead, and engage them until the capitals could come up.

At least, that was the idea. If the battlegroup didn’t come through the TRGA for some reason, there were ten Starblade fighters on this side that would be in a hell of a lonely situation.

Worse would be what might happen if the local hostiles proved too much for the entire battlegroup. America and her escorts might die here, on this side of the TRGA.

Which would mean that the Black Demons would have already been wiped out.

An enemy particle beam grazed his fighter, jolting him hard. He bit off a curse and tumbled to the left, targeting an alien that was close—too close—and firing. The plasma shock wave jolted him a second time.

Damn it, don’t think so much. Angry, now, at allowing himself to be distracted, he focused all of his attention on the data cascading through his link with his fighter.

Where was Cyn? He’d lost her in that last exchange. An icon flashed against the dazzling backdrop of thickly crowded stars. There …

The red icons were drawing together, bunching up.

What the hell are they up to?

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge

N’gai Cluster, T-0.876gy

0503 hours, TFT

Emergence …

Gray leaned forward in his seat, staring out into the throng of crowded suns, the central heart of a pocket-sized galaxy almost 900 million years lost in the remote past. At least, that was the idea …

“America,” he said, addressing the ship’s primary AI. “Do you have the temp-nav data yet?”

“Affirmative, Admiral,” the ship’s mind replied, more as a mental impression than as distinct words. “Downloading to Navigation now.”

“Got it, Admiral,” Commander Victor Blakeslee reported. “Looks like we’re spot-on. According to the positions of three hundred key stars, we’re at the same spot as the Koenig Expedition, plus twenty years.”

“Looks like we arrived after the armistice,” Commander Dean Mallory, the chief tactical officer, observed. “That’s good news.”

Gray nodded. “Time seems to pass at the same rate on both sides of a triggah,” he said. “Good to know. I wasn’t looking forward to fighting the sons of bitches again.”

“No, sir.”

Around America, other ships of Task Force 1 were gathering as, in ones and twos and threes, they slipped through from their present to their remote past.

“Tactical! Do we have a fix on Point One?”

“We have them!” Mallory replied. “Bearing zero-zero-five, minus two-one, range two-six-thousand. We have multiple nuke detonations and particle beam discharges.”

“Captain Gutierrez …”

“Coming to new heading, Admiral,” Gutierrez said. “Zero-zero-five, minus two-one.”

“Punch it.”

America glided forward, accelerating behind the thousand-times-per-second flicker of her gravitational singularity projected out ahead of her shield cap. The other eleven human ships of the battlegroup, plus the alien Nameless, edged into the new vector and accelerated in the star carrier’s wake. Ideally, the destroyers Diaz or Mattson would have been in the battlegroup’s van, along with a couple of frigates, clearing the way, but Gray didn’t want to spend the extra time organizing his tiny fleet while one of the carrier’s fighter squadrons was heavily engaged just 26,000 kilometers ahead. Judging from the swarm of alien fighters in the distance, by-the-book tactics weren’t going to afford the carrier much protection in any case … if at all.

“CAG,” Gray said, “you may loose the rest of the hounds.”

Captain Connie Fletcher was America’s CAG, the commander of the star carrier’s fighter group. “Launching fighters, aye, aye, sir.”

“All ships,” Gray continued. “Fire when you have a clear shot …”

Chapter Three

29 October 2425

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

0507 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray dropped into America’s Combat Information Center, the CIC, located in the carrier’s command tower just below the flag and ship bridge compartments. His physical body was still in the gentle grip of his command seat on the flag bridge, but the datastream feeding through his cerebral implants created the illusion—the perfect illusion—of standing one deck below, in CIC. Holographic projectors within the bulkheads gave him a realistic if insubstantial body.

Mallory looked up from the tank, a 3-D display area at the center of the compartment. “Virtual admiral on deck,” he intoned.

Gray nodded to Mallory as he approached. “What do we have, Dean?”

“A very large number of Sh’daar fighters, Admiral. They were waiting when our fighters came through, and jumped them.”

“Sh’daar fighters?”

“We assume so, sir. They’re small—a couple of meters at the most. We’re not sure, but we think they may not be piloted by organic intelligence.”

“AIs, then.”

“Or remotely controlled from a command ship we haven’t spotted yet.”

“That wouldn’t be likely. Knock out the command ship and we’d take out all of the fighters.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly. More likely they’re acting as part of a massively parallel network.”

“Meaning the whole swarm might be a single intelligence.”

“Possibly, Admiral. Yes.”

“Is there any chance that the swarm is part of some kind of sentry system?” Gray asked. “An automated defense network protecting this side of the triggah?”

“We’re considering that possibility, Admiral,” a woman floating upside down from Gray’s perspective said. When he glanced at her, her ping data identified her as Lieutenant Commander Tonia Evans, and she was new to America’s personnel roster. “They act like an automated defense system.”

He grinned. “And how would an alien defense net act?” he wondered. “What I want to know is why didn’t they challenge us, why didn’t they challenge the Demons when they first came through?”

She looked unhappy. “Unknown, sir.”

“One way or another, the Sh’daar have some explaining to do,” he said. “Attacking us for no reason at all was not in the armistice treaty.”

Not that the Sh’daar necessarily understood that treaty, at least in the way humans did. Any agreement with such fundamentally different minds was going to be open to misunderstandings, misinterpretation, and outright confusion.

Still, “Don’t attack us,” should be pretty straightforward.

“We’re certain we’re in the right time?” Gray said.

“Navigation has double-checked the star positions, Admiral,” Mallory said. “We’re definitely in the double-T. Between eighteen and twenty-three years after we were here last.”

Good. We hit double-T—the temporal target. So what the hell is going on?

Possibly, Gray thought, the attack on the battlegroup was simply the way the Sh’daar understood the treaty provisions: if the humans poked their noses into the N’gai Cluster of 876 million years in their past, they would get punched in the face.

If that was the case—if they didn’t want humans hanging around in their epoch—they were going to love what the battlegroup had to offer them this time around.

Making this a very short-lived armistice.

“Targets within range,” Mallory announced. “Firing …”

Beams lashed out from America’s main batteries, followed closely by beams and missiles from the battlegroup coming up astern. The enemy swarm began gathering, moving toward the fleet, even as 100-megaton blasts from Black Demon missiles continued to rip through the heaviest concentrations of Sh’daar ships. The carrier’s other fighter squadrons were just beginning to engage the enemy as well: VFA-31, the Impactors, and VFA-215, the Black Knights.

A fourth fighter squadron, one brand new to America’s flight decks, hung back to provide close support for the battlegroup—VFA-190, the Ghost Riders.

Gray heard the chatter among pilots as the fighters attacked, in tones ranging from ice-cold professionalism to shrill excitement.

“Impactor Nine, moving in …”

“Target lock … Fox One!”

“Knight Three! Knight Three! You’ve got two on your six!”

“I can’t shake them! I can’t—”

America trembled as something struck the star carrier.

“Hit to the shield,” Mallory reported. “We’re bleeding …”

According to damage control, however, the damage was minor, a few hundred thousand liters of water spilling into hard vacuum and freezing as glittering grains of ice. Self-repair nano on the inner hull was already closing off the hole.

“This is the Mitchell!” another voice called. “We’re taking heavy fire … damage to the main drive … damage to primary power … —Damn it! Mayday! Mayday!”

A long stream of Sh’daar fighters had looped out and around, coming in on the frigate Mitchell from astern. On displays and within his own mind, Gray could see the ship, her stern crumpling as the artificially conjured black holes that plucked power from the vacuum spun out of control and began devouring the ship from within.

Gray checked the tank to see which human ships were closest.

“Diaz! Young!” he ordered. “Close in with the Mitchell! See if you can hold those bogies off!”

It was too little, too late, though. The Mitchell died quickly, collapsing into her own power tap singularity …

“Too many of the bastards are getting through, Dean,” Gray said. “Pull the fighters back.”

“We can’t go on the defensive, Admiral. We need to hit them, hit them hard, away from the fleet!”

That was the conventional and established naval-fighter doctrine.

But this wasn’t a conventional fight.

“That won’t help if the fleet is wiped out of the sky, damn it. Pull in the fighters!”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

It was becoming almost impossible to pull useful data from the furball spreading out around the battlegroup. Thousands of alien craft continued to converge on the human capital ships, while a scant forty or so human fighters tried to hold them off. America’s AIs sifted through the mess and extracted the most important info for human analysis, but increasingly the fight was in the electronic hands of the ship’s combat system.

A bright flash snapped through the CIC. “What was that?” Gray demanded.

“Checking sir …” Mallory adjusted the display field to show the Glothr emissary ship Nameless. “It was the Glothr ship, Admiral. Looks like she has teeth.”

“What the hell did they use?”

“Not sure … but I think they might’ve just time-twisted a laser into gamma ray frequencies.”

Gray wasn’t sure he understood what that meant, but that wasn’t surprising, as Glothr technology embraced several concepts that most humans didn’t yet understand. One of the more startling involved actually bending time. How they managed that trick was a mystery, but human xenotechnologists thought they might do it by using intense but short-ranged gravitational singularities tightly focused next to their hulls. By stretching time out—making an instant last seconds or longer—they could dissipate the energy of a thermonuclear explosion—a neat trick if you wanted to avoid getting fried by an incoming nuke.

Apparently, they could use the trick offensively as well. By turning a second into an instant, they could vastly increase the electromagnetic frequency of a laser, pumping it up to far more destructive energy levels.

Gray frowned. The extra energy had to come from somewhere, but he wasn’t sure he saw how it worked. Then he gave a mental shrug. Dozens of Sh’daar fighters had just evaporated in that beam. He would accept the gift-horse advantage of Glothr tech and worry about the details later. Maybe it was just the equivalent of firing a laser continuously for an hour, but compressing all of that energy into a single pulse.

At this point all he cared about was the fact that when the Glothr vessel fired again, more enemy ships flashed into hot plasma.

But there were simply too many of them. Each ship in the battlegroup now was surrounded by its own cloud of fighters, and they were pressing in close. Individually, they weren’t that powerful, firing particle beams in the gigawatt-laser range of destructiveness. When fifty of them fired at once, however, aiming at the same target … or a hundred … or five hundred …

The railgun cruiser Leland was in trouble. The largest warship in the battlegroup after America herself—eight hundred meters long and massing a quarter of a billion tons—she was built around a magnetic accelerator tube nearly as long as she was, a mobile artillery piece designed for planetary bombardment or engaging large enemy vessels. Her primary weapon was useless against fighter swarms, however, and the elephant’s point-defense batteries were swiftly being overwhelmed by clouds of Sh’daar mosquitos.

“Verdun!” Gray called. “Deutschland! Close in on the Leland and give her some support!”

The two ships were Pan-European heavy cruisers, former enemies now incorporated into the USNA battlegroup as a show of political will. Gray hoped their point defense weaponry would help keep the larger Leland from being mobbed.

But the European vessels were already fighting their own enemy swarms … and now the aliens attacking America herself were getting past the carrier’s PDBs. The ship shuddered again, a vicious jolt, rolling heavily to starboard.

“We just lost Turret Five,” Mallory reported. Damage control imagery showed that one of the big particle-beam turrets mounted on the carrier’s central axis had been ripped away. For a moment, air vented into space from pressurized areas, mingled with clouds of debris and, horribly, several flailing human figures, made minute by the scale of their surroundings.

Then the open compartment was sealed off, and the escaping air—rapidly freezing into glittering flecks—dwindled away to nothing.

Gray knew he would remember those human figures—so tiny against the dark!—for the rest of his life.

A number of Sh’daar fighters slammed bodily into the long, lean hull of the French cruiser Verdun. They seemed to be eating their way in through the cruiser’s hull … and then all of them detonated in a chain of white-hot flares that devoured the vessel’s central spine. More explosions followed … with the wreckage crumpling in upon itself in a seething storm of radiation, heat, and light.

We’re losing, Gray thought. We’re going under.

“All ships,” he ordered. “Come about and make for the TRGA.”

There was no choice. They’d stuck their collective nose into this time and space and gotten it bitten off.

They had to retreat. If they were going to save even a few of the battlegroup’s ships, they had to retreat now.

Lieutenant Donald Gregory

VFA-96, Black Demons

0516 hours, TFT

“Pull back and cover the America, people,” Mackey ordered. “They’re using fucking kamikaze tactics! We’ve got to stop them from getting through!”

Gregory had heard the order from the carrier’s CIC already, and had witnessed both the destruction of the Verdun and the damage done to America herself.

It was a hopeless fight. So far, he’d run through about half of the missiles in his magazine, but as the fighting enveloped the carrier more and more tightly, he was having to shift to his Gatling cannon, firing high-velocity kinetic-kill rounds of depleted uranium. Nuclear detonations were tricky things to employ close to the hulls of friendly ships, and the USNA fighter pilots were being forced to use more surgical methods in their defensive tactics.

Surgical methods took longer—you couldn’t yell “Fox One” and blow a dozen enemies away with a single highyield detonation, and you had to be frustratingly precise in the placement of your warshots.

One alien fighter, gleaming silver and irregular in shape, came in across America’s stern and raced up the length of her spine, Gregory in close pursuit. He fired a burst of KK rounds, but the angle was bad and the rounds glanced off the hurtling spacecraft with minimal damage. The rounds that missed slammed into the underside of the carrier’s shield cap forward … though with minimal damage as well, thank the gods. The carrier’s hull shields absorbed or deflected much of the impact.

For a terrifying moment, he thought the enemy craft was trying for one of America’s three landing bays in the steadily rotating hab section … but the fighter slipped between two of the moving bays and plunged toward the blunt, forwardleaning tower between hab module and the underside of the shield cap.

Damn! They were trying for the bridge and CIC!

The alien vessel struck the bridge tower at its base, just above the main hull of the carrier’s spine; Gregory’s Starblade flashed past an instant later, twisting around his grav singularity and angling out and away from the carrier. Braking hard, he reversed course and dropped toward the ship’s spine again, gliding past the blurred hull metal of the bridge tower. His AI signaled a target lock on the alien, which was melting now into America’s hull, sinking through the low-level bending of space, just above the ship’s outer hull, which deflected incoming energies. In another moment it would detonate, and the carrier might lose its bridge and combat information center all at once.

Gregory triggered his KK Gatling, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slamming into and through the enemy craft. A particle-beam shot might do too much damage, though in fact he didn’t have the time to give the decision any conscious thought. He aligned with the target and fired, watching white flares of heat and light and splashes of molten metal erupt from the partially sunken alien hull.

At the last instant, he pulled out, whipping around his drive singularity and using a tremendous burst of acceleration to shove his ship sideways to avoid becoming a kinetic-kill projectile himself.

He held his breath, waiting for the alien to explode.

It didn’t.

“America CIC,” he called, “this is Demon Four! You have an enemy bogie buried in the bridge tower!”

“We copy that, Demon Four. Acknowledged.”

“Better send some Marines in case they’re still alive.” And in case there’s a loose black hole inside the wreckage, he added to himself … but he didn’t say so aloud. The shipboard response teams knew their business.

“Copy that, Four. Thanks for the assist.”

“All part of our friendly Black Demon service,” he replied, with a nonchalance that he definitely did not feel. That had been too damned close for sanity!

And they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So here I go again …

A group of eight alien fighters were inbound, a thousand kilometers out. He locked on and fired one of his dwindling number of Kraits. The detonation moments later took out seven of the eight; he nailed the survivor with another burst from his Gatling, watching the wreckage collapse in upon itself, folding up tighter and tighter until it vanished in a surprised pop of hard X-rays.

That was proof that the Sh’daar fighters had power taps similar to what the human ships were using—tiny black holes that skimmed energy from the frothing virtual energy at the base of reality and made it real. When a ship was destroyed, the black hole inside often ate much of the wreckage, then evaporated. Sometimes the singularity hung around long enough to become a menace to navigation, but luckily that wasn’t the case this time.

Unluckily, there were more opportunities, because beyond those eight Sh’daar ships another ten were approaching at high speed.

“Damn it,” Gregory snapped. “How many of these things are there?”

His Starblade’s AI gave him an answer, though as an impression, an unspoken realization, rather than in words. More than six thousand, out of an original estimated nine thousand …

Too fucking many. They’d destroyed thousands of the things already … but thousands more remained.

“All ships, this is America CIC,” a voice announced. “Be aware … we have more Sh’daar vessels inbound, repeat, more Sh’daars inbound. Capital ships, this time …”

Great! he thought. Just fucking great!

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

0535 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray stared into the mass of alien vessels headed for the battlegroup from dead ahead. America’s tactical AIs had counted over three hundred so far, including a couple of monsters that must have started out as planetoids, kilometers across and massing billions of tons.

There would be no escape from so powerful an alien force …

He saw exactly three different tactical options—surrender, fight to the death, or order the fleet to scatter in the hope that a few of the battlegroup’s ships, at least, might make it back through the TRGA and reach home. None of those choices was particularly appealing … and a fourth option emerged.

“Open a channel to that fleet,” he told the communication officer on America’s bridge. “Use the Agletsch protocols. See if they’re willing to talk.”

“They are already willing to talk, Admiral.” The voice was that of Konstantin—or, rather, of a clone of that powerful AI. “I am now in communication with them.”

The Konstantin clone was resident within the TOAF module, a cylinder strapped to America’s spine aft of the rotating hab section, but was linked in through the carrier’s electronic network to America’s resident AIs. It hadn’t spoken before, and Gray had more or less forgotten that it was there, but he welcomed its input now.

“What do they say, Konstantin?”

There was a brief but agonizing pause.

“The force ahead is siding with us,” the AI told him. “The small Sh’daar fighters appear to be … they are calling them counter-Refusers, which is confusing, but the word rebels may approximate the meaning.”

“Counterrevolutionaries?” Gray suggested. He’d encountered the term once in a downloaded history of twentieth-century global politics.

“Indeed. The Sh’daar, remember, began as what they termed Refusers, rejecting the ur-Sh’daar Schjaa Hok.”

“‘The Transcending,’” Gray said, giving the alien term its closest English translation. “I remember.”

They’d learned that bit of history twenty years ago, during the Koenig Expedition to this spacetime. Originally, the N’gai dwarf galaxy had been occupied by hundreds of mutually alien civilizations that humans now knew as the ur-Sh’daar … the original or primal Sh’daar. When that galactic culture had entered its own version of the technological singularity almost a billion years in Humankind’s past, some, for various reasons, had rejected or somehow avoided the transformation, becoming known as “Refusers.”

“Are you telling me that these fighter swarms are Sh’daar who embrace the ur-Sh’daar Transcending?”

“I do not yet have enough data on Sh’daar ideologies or political interactions to say with certainty,” Konstantin replied. “However, that is certainly a valid possibility.”

“So why the hell were they attacking us?”

“I do not have enough information as of yet to give you a meaningful reply,” Konstantin told him. “But this rebel subgroup must feel threatened by our arrival in some way. Perhaps they wish to join the original ur-Sh’daar, and fear that we would threaten or delay their plans.”

“Hell, if they want to go, let them,” Gray said. “Attacking us without provocation isn’t a rational act.”

“Again, Admiral, I would caution you that we lack hard data as to their motives, needs, and aspirations. It’s too early to speculate concerning their actions.”

Damned machine. “Let me know when you have hard data.”

“Of course.”

“In the meantime, what about our new best buddies out there?”

The Sh’daar vessels ahead were spreading out. America’s long-range sensors were detecting bursts of gamma radiation—evidence of positron annihilation. The aliens were using antimatter weaponry.

“They appear to be attacking the rebels, Admiral.”

“You’re saying they’re rescuing us?”

“So it would appear, Admiral.”

“All ships,” Gray said, using the battlegroup’s tactical channel. “Disengage and pull back. The cavalry’s just galloped in to the rescue. Stay clear and let them do their thing.”

Sh’daar fighters continued to press their attack on the America battlegroup, trying to overwhelm the human defenses … but the fleet of capital ships was moving in swiftly, now, using precisely wielded bursts of antimatter particles to vaporize the minute alien ships.

And then the surviving alien fighters were breaking off and fleeing, scattering out and away and into the surrounding cloud of densely packed suns.

“Admiral, the Adjugredudhran commander of the Sh’daar flagship Ancient Hope gives you its greetings,” Konstantin reported. “It hopes our force has not suffered serious loss … and regrets the counter-Refuser attack on our vessels. It suggests that we follow the Sh’daar fleet into the Core … to the vicinity of the Six Suns.”

Gray let out a pent-up breath. He felt weak … shaky enough that he wondered if he would have been able to stand in a full gravity. So close …

“Please thank the Ad … thank the Sh’daar commander,” he replied, “and tell it that we will comply.”

“Well,” Mallory said out loud. He’d obviously been listening in on the conversation with Konstantin. “Let the diplomacy games begin.”

“Better with words than with particle cannon,” Gray said with a shrug. “I guess it’s a good thing we brought Konstantin-2 out here.”

“It would’ve been nice if the good guys had been here to meet us,” Mallory said. “I don’t trust this.”

“Neither do I, Dean. But let’s see what they have to say.”

And the battlegroup—the ten survivors, at any rate, plus the Glothr liaison ship—fell into formation with the far more numerous locals.

Admiral Gray looked at the nearest of the Sh’daar vessels—a monster wedge five kilometers long, its hull gliding past a few kilometers away like a massive black cliff dotted with city lights …

… and felt very, very small.

Chapter Four

29 October 2425

New White House

Washington, D.C.

United States of North America

0840 hours, EST

“So what’s up on the docket for today?” President Koenig asked.

Marcus Whitney, Koenig’s White House chief of staff, laid a secure data pad on the high-tech desk before him. “You had a nine-hundred with the Pan-Euro ambassador, sir, and an eleven-hundred with the Periphery reclamation council from Northern Virginia …”

“‘Had?’”

“Yes, sir. I rescheduled. Konstantin wants to vir-meet with you.”

“Konstantin? Wants to see me?” Generally, it was the other way around. “What about?”

“He has not divulged his agenda, Mr. President.”

The powerful AI rarely mixed its affairs with those of humans. Even so, its effects on human culture, technology, and politics had been far reaching indeed. Its input had effectively ended the USNA’s conflict with the Confederation government by employing memetic weaponry to turn civilian support against the war. It continually monitored news feeds and imagery from around the Earth, making suggestions that had averted famines, alleviated plagues, and blocked wars. It had guided presidents in both military and political exchanges both with other human states and with aliens.

Ever since Koenig had taken office as president, Konstantin had been an unofficial and highly secret special advisor. The strange thing was that the machine intelligence—not a human agency or department—seemed to have developed the idea.

And Koenig had no idea what the AI’s true motivations might be.

“I guess,” he said slowly, “I’d better find out what he wants. See that I’m not disturbed, Marcus.”

“Yes, sir.”

As his aide left the office, Koenig leaned back in his chair, which reshaped itself to more comfortably fit his frame. He placed the palm of his left hand on a smooth, glassy plate set into the chair’s arm and on the desk, the datapad winked on …

… and Koenig opened his eyes inside a small and dimly lit log cabin in Kaluga, Russia. An elderly man—white-haired, goateed, with wire-frame pince-nez and a sleepy expression—looked up from an old-fashioned book.

“Hello, Konstantin,” Koenig said. “You wanted to see me?”

As always, Koenig had the feeling that the figure before him was studying him narrowly, with a superhuman intensity quite at odds with the sleepy expression on its very human face. Everything was an illusion, of course, created by the AI and downloaded into Koenig’s mind through the virtual reality software running on his cerebral implants. The anachronistic touches demonstrated that—the real Konstantin Tsiolkovsky never had banks of high-definition monitors on the walls of his log house. Nor had the famous Russian pioneer of astronautic theory spoken English.

“Yes, Mr. President. It is time that you and I had a chat. I have some information that may be of interest.”

“You haven’t heard from your clone on the America yet …”

“No. If our calculations are correct, they have only just arrived at the N’gai Cloud … if, indeed, the two different time frames can be meaningfully compared. But we have heard from the Agletsch. They have made available some information. Gratis.”

“They gave it to us?” Koenig was impressed. “That means it’s either worthless … or of unbelievably high value.”

“Agreed.”

The Agletsch exchanged information from across a vast swath of the galaxy for other information, as well as for certain rare elements—notably isotopes of neptunium and californium. They never gave stuff away for free.

Not unless it very definitely benefited them as well.

“So what’s the information?”

Koenig waited out the slight time delay. It took one and a quarter seconds for his words to reach Konstantin on Luna’s far side, another second and a quarter for the answer to return. Every exchange had a built-in 2.5-second pause.

“They strongly suggest that we check out Tabby’s Star,” Konstantin told him.

“I don’t know that one,” Koenig said. “At least not by that name.”

“Here is the download.”

Information flooded through Koenig’s implants and into his conscious awareness.

A mental window opened, filling with scrolling text.

Object: KIC 8462852

Alternate names: WTF Star, Tabby’s Star

Type: Main-sequence star; Spectral Type: F3 V/IV

Coordinates: RA: 20h 06m 15.457s Dec: + 44° 27′ 24.61″

Constellation: Cygnus

Mass: ~ 1.43 SOL; Radius: 1.58 SOL;

Rotation: 0.8797 DAYS

Temperature: 6750° K; Luminosity: 5 SOL

Apparent Magnitude: 11.7;

Absolute Magnitude: 3.08

Distance: 1480 LY

Age: ~ 4 billion years

Notes: First noted in 2009–2015 as a part of the data collected by the Kepler space telescope. An extremely unusual pattern of light fluctuations proved difficult to explain as a natural phenomenon, and raised the possibility that intermittent dips in the star’s light output were the result of occultations by intelligently designed alien megastructures.

KIC 8462852 received the unofficial name “Tabby’s Star” after Tabetha S. Boyajian, head of the citizen scientist group that first called attention to the object. It was also called the “WTF star”—a humorous name drawn from the title of her paper: “Where’s the Flux?” At that time, “WTF” was a slang expression of surprise or disbelief.

The Tabby’s Star anomalies were eventually explained as a combination of an accretion disk and odd stellar geometry brought on by the star’s high rate of spin and resultant gravitational darkening …

There was a lot more information in the download, and Koenig waded through it. He wasn’t familiar with much of it.

In the early twenty-first century, the Kepler space telescope had continuously monitored the light coming from some 150,000 stars in a small section of Cygnus; planets orbiting those stars would periodically block a tiny percentage of the light, causing dips in the stars’ brightness.

That period, from 2009 through 2015, was a heady one of exploration and discovery, as thousands of exoplanets, worlds outside of Sol’s domain, were found, and Humankind became aware of the fact that the Milky Way alone might contain 40 billion worlds like Earth. Out of all of those target stars, however, only one had showed a light curve as bizarre as one sun at the very edge of the target area: KIC 8462852. Light dips were frequent, sharp, and aperiodic—behaving like large numbers of huge objects orbiting their star “in tight formation,” as one astronomer put it. One particular object did seem to have a regular period. The first time it was spotted, it obscured 15 percent of the star’s light. The second time, 750 days later, it obscured 22 percent of the light.

Twenty-two percent? A super-Jupiter, the largest world possible, typically obscured about 1 percent of the light from its star as it passed in front of the star’s disk. To cause that big of a drop in the light output of the star, the eclipsing object would have to be so large it covered nearly a quarter of the star’s face. This could not be a planet, so what the hell was it?

Dozens of theories were fielded—possible natural explanations, including huge dust clouds, masses of perturbed comets, and colliding planets. None worked very well. The system was too old to have dust clouds or accretion disks, the chances of finding it just when planets had collided or comets descended were nil, and the amount of detectable infrared radiation was a bad fit for all of those possibilities.

Increasingly, astronomers were forced to consider the unthinkable—that the odd light curve of KIC 8462852 was due to some sort of alien megastructure, an intelligently designed and built structure or series of structures, such as a Dyson sphere under construction or, more likely, a Dyson swarm—thousands of objects absorbing energy from the star. The light curves seemed to suggest solid-edged, irregularly shaped structures with distinct boundaries rather than diffuse clouds of dust.

But the alien megastructure idea had to be the very last possibility to be considered. That was not because the astronomers didn’t want to think about aliens, but because the alien hypothesis was not falsifiable by scientific testing … and so it could not be considered until every other possibility had been tested and ruled out.

And eventually, a natural explanation was found. Fast-spinning stars could suffer an effect called gravitational darkening while flattening from a sphere into an oblate spheroid; several large planets transiting across different parts of the star’s surface, plus an accretion disk of dust, could cause greater or lesser dips in the light curve.

There were problems with that theory, though. The star did spin quickly—at the equator it rotated once in 21 hours and a few minutes as opposed to 25 days for Sol—but not fast enough to cause severe distortion of the sphere. And, again, the star just wasn’t young enough to have an orbiting cloud or accretion disk of dust.

But by that time, the twenty-first century had been in free fall toward utter chaos. Stunning and widespread political corruption, quickly rising sea levels, economic collapse, global war with Islam, the First Sino-Western War, and the ravages of the Blood Death … it was a wonder, frankly, that Humankind had survived. The hanging of the first space elevator, in the twenty-second century, had helped reverse the collapse, bringing in the raw materials, cheap energy, and improved technologies that ultimately transformed the planet.

But as Humankind began to establish a firm foothold in the solar system, the excitement over KIC 8462852 was largely forgotten. It became an interesting anomaly, quickly explained and as quickly filed away and ignored.

“Okay,” Koenig said after several minutes reviewing the material. “An interesting observation, but it says here they explained it. Why are the Agletsch interested in the thing? Or, maybe I should say … why do they want us to be interested?”

“They did not discuss that,” Konstantin replied. “But they seem to believe that our explanation was wrong. That Tabby’s Star is in fact the location of an advanced alien civilization.”

“But not an ally of the Sh’daar, I take it.”

“Correct.”

Humankind now understood that the Sh’daar were interlopers from the remote past, from T-0.876gy … a term usually abbreviated as “Tee-sub-minus,” or, in other words, from 876 million years in the past. They appeared to have recruited a number of alien civilizations in Tprime (meaning time now, the twenty-fifth century): the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Nungiirtok, the Slan, and quite a few others. That alliance, called the Sh’daar Collective, had been deployed against Humankind in an effort to force them to give up tech-singularity-inducing technologies. The Collective apparently extended into the future as well; the Glothr, from a rogue planet millions of years in the future, might well have been working with the Sh’daar, though the nature of that relationship was still uncertain.

The only reason Humankind had survived against that alliance as long as it had was the fact that the different members of the Sh’daar Collective had as much trouble communicating with one another as they did with humans. Organizing a joint military campaign across millions of years and with dozens of space-faring species with wildly diverse means of communicating turned out to be damned near impossible.

“Huh,” Koenig said, thoughtful. “If the Tabby’s Star aliens haven’t been pressured by the Sh’daar, they might turn out to be useful allies for us.”

“Exactly. Assuming, of course, that they care to involve themselves with humans.”

“What … they might not because we’re so primitive? Or would they be put off by our body odor?”

“Whatever terrestrial astronomers observed at Tabby’s Star in the year 2015,” Konstantin reminded Koenig, “would have happened 1480 years earlier … in the year 535 C.E., to be precise. If they were actually building a Dyson sphere when Europe’s Dark Ages were just getting started, where are they, and what are they building now? Such beings might seem like gods compared to humans.”

“The Stargods …” It was an old idea, one suggesting a source for unexplained technological artifacts like the TRGAs scattered across the galaxy … or the Black Rosette at the heart of Omega Centauri. Laurie Taggart had been a passionate devotee of that idea, a member of the Ancient Alien Creationist Church.

But it was also an idea that explained nothing.

“What people enamored of the Stargods tend to forget,” Konstantin said, “is that such beings very likely have absolutely nothing in common with us. Would you stop to communicate with an anthill?”

“I don’t know,” Koenig replied with a virtual shrug. “It depends on whether I could understand what the little buggers were saying. And there are entomologists who would be interested in finding a common language, if there was one.”

“It is possible to push such metaphors too far, Mr. President. The point is that the Tabby’s Star aliens may have nothing whatsoever in common with humans, and no wish to communicate with them … or to help them against the Sh’daar.”

“I could also imagine them having reached their own technological singularity,” Koenig said. “They might have built the thing, whatever it is … and then left. They’re not around any longer.”

“True. Still, the fact that the Agletsch have suggested that a human ship explore Tabby’s Star outweighs, somewhat, the low probability of finding useful allies there.”

“Well, if anyone in the galaxy knows about such allies, it would be them. I just wish we knew a bit more about the Aggie agenda. What the hell do they get out of all of this?”

“You will need to treat this … gift of information with caution,” Konstantin said. “The Agletsch are Sh’daar agents, members of the Sh’daar Collective. We must assume the Agletsch have an agenda of their own, a reason to share this information freely. It is unlikely that they would actively help us against the Collective.”

“Maybe they’re tired of sticking to the Collective’s party line. Maybe they’re trying to rebel.”

The idea had been explored before. In the past, some Agletsch had seemed to be working outside of any Sh’daar influence. Others definitely worked within. There’d been … hints that they would prefer that their entire civilization be free of Sh’daar influence. And, indeed, the information they had traded to humans in the past concerning various Sh’daar client races had again and again proven to be priceless.

But what was their angle this time?

And can we risk ignoring their advice while we try to figure that out?

“I would like to send our best out there,” Koenig told the AI, coming to a decision.

“The star carrier America,” Konstantin replied. “Admiral Gray.”

“You know, Konstantin, we do have other star carriers. Not enough, maybe … but we have others.”

“Most currently undergoing repairs.”

“There are the Declaration and the Lexington.”

“Both untried as yet. And the Declaration is still undergoing space trials. I recommend using America when she returns from the N’gai Cluster.”

“We were going to deploy America out to the Black Rosette. Operation Omega.”

“But to explore what might well be an entire Dyson sphere,” Konstantin pointed out, “it would be best to have several fighter wings available. Star carriers offer certain specific tactical advantages not possible with cruisers or even light carriers.”

“Point,” Koenig conceded, reluctantly. “But we’ve taken some heavy casualties. We may not have the luxury of using our first choice.”

TC/USNA CVS America

Flag Bridge/CIC

N’gai Cluster

1640 hours, TFT

Admiral Gray floated in the CIC, gazing into a tangled jungle of suns ahead, against which even the biggest Sh’daar warships appeared to be toys. He remembered this vista from his last deployment here, back when he’d been a fighter driver under the command of Admiral Koenig.

Now he was admiral … but the view was the same.

Local space was crowded with suns, including hundreds more brilliant than Venus at its brightest in the skies of Earth. Six stars, in particular, outshone all others—a perfect hexagram of dazzlingly brilliant blue suns gleaming almost directly ahead. The Six Suns were the hub of the N’gai Cluster, a kind of central, focal monument for the Cluster’s star-faring civilization. Each giant star was forty times the mass of distant Sol, orbiting with the others around a central gravitational balance point in a perfect Klemperer rosette. Obviously they’d been engineered that way, probably nudged in from elsewhere in the galaxy and dropped into position. Quite possible those blue-white giant suns themselves were artificial, engineered by some highly advanced science. The stellar arrangement suggested an astonishing degree of technological prowess and skill, one millions of years in advance of current human capabilities.

Eight hundred and some million years in the future, in the time Gray thought of as the present, those suns had long since gone supernova, reducing themselves to black holes—the enigmatic Black Rosette at the center of Omega Centauri. The N’gai Cluster—a dwarf galaxy—had been devoured by the gravitational hunger of the much larger Milky Way. The Omega Centauri star cluster itself was now known to be the remnant nucleus of this, the N’gai Cluster, 872 million years later.

Gray stared into the brilliance of the Six Suns, and wondered …

What were the Rosette Aliens?

All he knew was that they were enigmatic and highly advanced beings of unknown capabilities and unknown origin who’d appeared at the Black Rosette and begun building … something, a structure vast and utterly mysterious.

Were the Rosette Aliens somehow related to the Sh’daar?

Maybe we’re going to find out at last, Gray thought.

Numerous other artifacts also hung against that dazzling starscape, all indicating an advanced civilization far more technically proficient, far more ancient than anything merely human, such as the TRGA cylinders and artificial planets, not to mention strange structures, vast and incomprehensible. There were enormous tube-shaped habitats hundreds of kilometers across, rotating to provide artificial gravity and displaying terrain across their curving inner surfaces spread out like maps. Black holes ringed by artificial structures were obvious sources of high-tech energy, and starships the size of sprawling cities made their way across the crowded backdrop of the dwarf galaxy’s core.

A number of Sh’daar vessels, many considerably larger than America, by now had gathered around the human fleet, bending space briefly, and bringing the battlegroup across several light years to the dwarf galaxy’s heart. Now those ships were guiding America and the other vessels to their final destination, an entire world larger than Earth, covered over completely with black metal and the tangled, blazing knots of what could only be urban centers and vast industrial facilities. More of that planet’s surface appeared to be roofed over in artificial, light-drinking ebon materials than was open to the sky.

It was a single city the size of a planet.

The metallic world did not appear to have a sun, but was wandering among the densely packed stars of the cluster’s core, bathed in their light.

“The Adjugredudhran commander of the Sh’daar flagship reports that this is their capital world,” Konstantin-2 reported. “Daar N’gah.”

“Very well,” Gray replied. “Thank you. Do we have their permission to approach the consulate?”

There was a long pause. “Affirmative, Admiral. Deep Time currently is in an extended orbit, about half a million kilometers farther on. They request that we give Daar N’gah wide clearance due to local traffic.”

Which might, Gray reflected, be the full truth, or it might reflect Sh’daar concerns about more rebels appearing and the potential for collateral damage to the planet if another firefight began. Either way, it made sense to him from a tactical standpoint if he were in their position.

“Tell them we will comply.”

America, under her own power now, swung wide of the black metal world and decelerated into the indicated orbit. The consulate station unofficially known as Deep Time gleamed ahead in the harsh, reflected light from the Six Suns, a silvery, glittering torus rotating to provide those aboard with artificial gravity.

Deep Time had started out eight months earlier as a small USNA deep space military base constructed in the N’gai Cloud to keep an eye on the Sh’daar, a concession by the Collective possible only with the base’s near-total demilitarization. No lasers or particle cannon, no high-velocity KK weaponry, nothing that might upset the unknowable currents and eddies of time itself. The men and women stationed here were permitted sidearms, but the posting was strictly made on a volunteer basis. Hand lasers and man-portable pee-beeps were no match for five-kilometer flying mountains.

A couple of months earlier, while America had been deployed to the far future, the Deep Time station in the far past had been designated as a kind of semiofficial consulate, Humankind’s ambassadorial presence in the N’gai Cluster … though, again, no one knew what the Sh’daar themselves thought of the arrangement. The consulate staff, including almost a hundred xenosophontologists, had been studying the Sh’daar and their civilization, at least as it had existed in the remote past, the epoch known as Tee-sub-minus.

Humans now knew that the ancient Sh’daar had time-traveled to Earth’s galaxy in the twenty-sixth century, the epoch they called Tee-sub-prime, and made contact with the various star-faring civilizations that had been fighting their on-again, off-again war with Earth. On Earth, it begged the question were the Sh’daar of the twenty-sixth century under the control of the ancient N’gai civilization? No one knew for sure, and attempts to query the ancient Sh’daar had so far been frustrating and inconclusive.

With the civil war on Earth concluded at last, however, it was time to find out the truth … and also for the humans to warn the ancient Sh’daar about what they had learned even further into the remote future. The America battlegroup had been dispatched as an escort for the Glothr emissary—an opportunity to show the flag, and to back up the Glothr representatives with firepower if necessary.

Gray desperately hoped that firepower would not be necessary. The Sh’daar were so far in advance of Earth technology that it was difficult to even compare the two. Human tacticians still weren’t sure what it was that the Sh’daar had feared about America and her escorts twenty years ago … or why they’d given in so easily.

Or if they had truly given in at all, Gray thought.

“Range to Deep Time One now four thousand kilometers,” Mallory reported. “We’re slowing our approach.”

“We’re receiving telemetry from DT-1,” Pam Wilson, the communications officer added. “They report everything quiet and normal.”

“Very well.” So far, so good …

The attack as they’d emerged from the TRGA had shaken Gray more than he cared to admit.

Gray no longer needed image enhancement and magnification to see DT-1. It was visible in CIC’s forward view, just a kilometer away, now.

“Konstantin?” Gray asked. “Are you ready?”

“Of course, Admiral. You may release me at your discretion.”

“Captain Gutierrez,” Gray said. “If you will …”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. Releasing the baby in three … two … one … launch.”

The Tsiolkovsky Orbital Computer Assembly—TOCA, for short—was a ten-meter cylindrical habitat that had made the voyage out from Earth strapped to America’s spine aft of the landing bays. It carried the computer hardware that was housing the sub-clone downloaded from the original Konstantin AI.

Gray wasn’t certain the Sh’daar understood the concept of “ambassador,” but they’d given permission for the TOCA cylinder to be brought to N’gai, and for it—and Konstantin-2—to be linked to the Deep Time facility. The fact that the AI had already been in touch with the Adjugredudhran commander said they at least accepted Konstantin-2 as someone they could talk to.

Something, Gray thought, definitely had changed in Sh’daar attitudes. Twenty years earlier, they’d been terrified that a human battlegroup had penetrated both space and time to reach this cluster. The Sh’daar had been willing to do almost anything—like end a war—to make the humans leave. Speculation and scuttlebutt had played with the idea that they were afraid human activity here in the past would rewrite the future—a future in which they had a vested interest.

Now, however, they seemed to be welcoming contact.

Gray suspected that they feared something else more than they feared humans … even humans playing in their own temporal backyard.

The cylinder carrying Konstantin’s sub-clone passed America’s shield cap and dwindled toward the gleaming silver torus.

And Gray couldn’t help wondering if even a super-AI was going to have trouble figuring out just what made the Sh’daar tick.

Chapter Five

2 November 2425

Deep Time Orbital Facility-1

N’gai Cluster

1020 hours, TFT

Gray was seated in what appeared to be a large classroom or lecture hall. Concentric rings of comfortable benches overlooked a central well a dozen meters across. A dome overhead looked out into the heart of the N’gai Cluster, filled with stars, with artificial worlds, with the enigmatic gleam of the Six Suns. McKennon, the lead xenosophontologist of the Deep Time facility, was seated next to him … or seemed to be. In fact, Gray was back in his office on board America, while McKennon was in a communications chamber on board DT-1. AI software created the illusion—the virtual reality—of their conversation within their cerebral implants.

Other conference attendees—all human, so far—were scattered through the room, waiting for the start of what promised to be a very interesting meeting.

“Yes,” Gray said, “but we weren’t sure of that. All we knew was that if we were just a hair off course during the passage through the TRGA cylinder, it could screw both with where and when we emerged … possibly by quite a lot.” Gray chuckled. “You have no idea how terrified I was that we might emerge before Koenig arrived here … twenty years ago. That would have done a job on causality, let me tell you!”

“Twenty years out of eight hundred seventy-six million?” McKennon said, and nodded. “You would need a degree of precision good to within one part in forty-three point eight million. You’re right. That’s pretty tight! Fortunately, it looks like there’s some leeway built into the thing.”

“We suspected as much when we took our initial temporal navigation readings,” Gray told her. “But it’s good to hear it from someone who knows what she’s doing.”

“Who, me?” She laughed. “Just about everything we’ve done since we got here has been pure guesswork!”

Gray looked up at the apparent dome covering the virtual classroom. Beyond, high in the sky and made tiny by distance, those six brilliant, blue-white suns locked together in a hexagram served to mock mere human science, math, and technology. They represented an obviously artificial engineering on an interstellar scale, one that utterly dwarfed human ideas of what was possible … human ideas of scale and scope and sanity.

“I’d say your team has done a pretty good job so far,” Gray said slowly, “given that you’re working with ideas and capabilities that we can’t even begin to understand.”

She followed his gaze up, up and out into the distance to the tightly ordered gleam of the Six Suns. “Every time I see that … thing,” she admitted, “I wonder how it’s even possible that we’ve survived as long as we have. The Sh’daar could have wiped us out easily, at any point since our first encounter with them. Instead, we’ve fought their proxies piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Did the Sh’daar build it?” Gray asked. “I thought there was some question about that.”

“Well, if it wasn’t them, it was the ur-Sh’daar. Before they transcended. Same thing, really. The Sh’daar are the ur-Sh’daar … leftovers?”

“Maybe,” Gray replied. “Or maybe there was a still earlier civilization.”

“Please, Admiral,” McKennon said, raising her hands in mock pain. “We don’t need to complicate things by imagining whole pantheons of mystic ancient Stargods!”

Gray laughed. “Of course not. But still … the universe started thirteen point eight billion years ago …”

“Thirteen point eight two,” she said, correcting him.

“Thirteen point eight two billion years,” he agreed. “Subtract four and a half billion years, which is how long it took to evolve a tool-using, spaceship-building species on Earth. That leaves well over nine billion years to play with. How many species can evolve; develop spaceflight, computers, and nanotechnology; and reach the point where they …” He stopped, looked up, gestured at the alien sky. “… where they can move stars around just to create a titanic objet d’art?”

“The Six Suns are probably a transportation system, like the TRGAs,” McKennon said. “Those rotating stellar masses twist spacetime, and open a gate to … I guess to somewhere else. Maybe somewhen else, too. We have no idea what it does. But I know what you’re saying. Whoever built the thing did it so … so casually. Like it was nothing for them to set six stars orbiting around a common center of gravity.”

“Uh-oh,” Gray said. “Looks like the Glothr just linked in.”

The image of one of the Glothr, presumably their equivalent of an ambassador, had just materialized off to the right side of the virtual classroom. Three meters tall and very roughly resembling a terrestrial jellyfish, the being stood on a writhing mass of tentacles, with a filmy mantle at the top, like a parasol. Much of the being was transparent or translucent; you could see the brain within a circle of twenty-four jet-black eyes. Its body, a column intermittently glimpsed behind the tentacle mass, was transparent, encasing its translucent internal organs.

Gray was glad that the writhing tangle of tentacles usually hid the being’s interior from view. Those tentacles—the thicker ones used for locomotion, the thinner ones for manipulation—tended to be translucent near their bases, but shaded into opaque grays and browns. The translucent parts shimmered with rainbow colors, like a shifting, oily sheen, and clusters of blue and green lights gleamed and winked within the glassy depths of the body. The Glothr, Gray knew, communicated with others of its kind by changing color. Translation to a spoken language could be a real bear … but one of the numerous Agletsch trade languages had been designed for beings that communicated visually. You just needed a computer to handle the actual color-to-speech part.

“That’s a Glothr?” McKennon asked. She seemed intrigued. But then, in her line of work, she would be.

“Yeah. That’s the Agletsch name for them, anyway. We ran into them something like twelve million years in the future.”

“You mean twelve million years after 2425?”

“That’s right.”

“We need a special grammar to handle time travel.”

“We certainly will need one.”

She laughed. “Okay. I downloaded one preliminary report, but I haven’t had a chance to follow through on them, yet,” McKennon said. “What are they like?”

He thought about the Glothr.

Twelve million years in the future—counting Gray’s home time as the present—a rogue world had given rise to a spectacularly advanced technic civilization. Sunless—adrift in emptiness with no star to call its own—the world named Invictus by humans was frigidly cold, at least on the surface, and eternally dark. Five times the mass of Earth, its surface chemistry was similar to that of Titan, based on liquid methane and ethane; a radioactive core kept a vast and lightless ocean liquid beneath many kilometers of ice as hard and as solid as rock.

And that’s pretty much all they knew. They were still a complete enigma, so far as Gray was concerned. They were apparently connected, in some way not yet understood, to the Sh’daar of Earth Tprime, though they’d come from 12 million years further up the line. When Gray had managed to make peaceful contact with the Glothr out beyond the edge of the galaxy in future deep time, there’d been hope that perhaps the Glothr could communicate with the Sh’daar of the remote past, and end their attempts to tame and assimilate Humankind. The oddly shaped ship that had brought this Glothr to the Sh’daar capital, the Nameless, was a Glothr time-bender ship, brought back across the eons to attempt just that. Gray didn’t know for sure, but he was pretty sure that Konstantin had been the one who’d thought of the idea.

“Hard to understand,” was all Gray could say at last. “They’re not at all like us. They’re actually colonial beings, kind of like the Portuguese man-of-war in Earth’s tropics. Lots of different organisms working together. And whatever they have for emotion … well, it doesn’t come through the translators very well.”

“The report I saw said they’re from a Steppenwolf.”

Steppenwolf world was a slang term for a rogue planet, one without a star … a lone wolf wandering the galactic steppes.

“That’s right. Invictus. It must have been flung out of its original star system billions of years ago, and has been wandering on its own ever since.”

“Huh. Daar N’gah is a rogue.”

“I saw when we entered orbit. I understand the Sh’daar—well, we would say terraformed—basically created it. They made the planet habitable using quantum power taps, or something like them.”

“That’s right. I don’t see a direct connection between the two, though. Daar N’gah was dead and frozen until the Sh’daar—or possibly the ur-Sh’daar—reworked it.”

“Well, they would have had lots to choose from.” Gray chuckled. “They’re estimating that there are more Steppenwolf worlds floating around in the galaxy than there are stars.”

“Yup. Four hundred billion plus. Apparently, every planetary system spits out a bunch of rogues early on, when the planets are starting to settle down into neat orbits. Most rogues are frozen and dead, of course …”

“But given the right conditions,” Gray said, “with enough internal warmth to allow liquid oceans and carbon chemistry for a few billion years, some of those billions are certain to evolve life, like Invictus.”

She nodded. “Or permit large-scale colonization, like Daar N’gah.”

Their conversation moved on to other things as more and more attendees, both human and not, appeared within the simulation. Newly arrived humans materialized on the benches. Others stood on flat areas between the benches … or the imagery was rewritten to eliminate sections of the benches entirely.

Gray and McKennon began discussing the Sh’daar of Tprime as compared with those of T-0.876gy … what President Koenig had once called late Sh’daar as opposed to early Sh’daar. After fifty-eight years of intermittent warfare, humans still weren’t sure if the various species arrayed against them—the Turusch and the H’rulka and the Slan and all the rest—were themselves Sh’daar or were merely manipulated by the Sh’daar. It seemed a small distinction, but it was a damned important one. How committed were, say, the Turusch to forcing Humankind to give up their beloved advanced technologies? Could they be convinced to turn against their alien masters from out of deep time?

And as they talked, Gray studied the woman with growing interest … and felt a pang of … what? Loneliness? Wistfulness? Possibly … guilt?

For a couple of years, now, Gray had enjoyed a close relationship with Laurie Taggart, America’s weapons officer … but Laurie had been offered a chance to advance her career, as exec on board the new battle carrier Lexington. It was an excellent opportunity for her; in a couple more years, she might have a chance at her own command.

But it left Gray missing her—and Angela—more than ever. Damn, damn, damn …

He considered asking if McKennon wanted to come over to America for dinner later … then sharply cut the thought off. He would be returning to Tprime soon, while she stayed here, 876 million years in the past. That was a hell of a burden to put on any relationship.

An Agletsch materialized in the room just a few meters from where Gray and McKennon were sitting, intruding on Gray’s increasingly unhappy thoughts. Her ID tag, which popped up in Gray’s mind alongside her image, identified her as Aar’mithdisch, one of the spidery, four-eyed Agletsch liaisons who’d come in on board the Glothr vessel. He knew it was a her; Agletsch males were small, leechlike creatures that adhered to the female’s body, like male anglerfish on Earth. After a time, they actually became a part of the female’s body, and eventually were absorbed completely.

At least, he thought, they didn’t have to worry about courtship and dating.

“Admiral Gray!” the translated voice of the being said when she swiveled an eyestalk in his direction and saw him. “The great moment is upon us, yes-no?”

The Agletsch had been the first nonhuman civilization encountered by humans as they spread out into interstellar space, an encounter in 2312 in the Zeta Doradus system, just 38 light years from Sol. Zeta Doradus was not their homeworld. No human knew where they’d come from originally; the price the Aggies put on that piece of information was literally astronomical. Called spiders or bugs by many humans, their oval sixteen-legged bodies vaguely resembled some terrestrial arthropods … in a bad light, perhaps, or after too many drinks.

Few humans trusted them. Some of that was due to their phobia-triggering looks, true, but for most Navy men, it was the fact that many carried nanotechnic storage and communications devices called seeds planted by the Sh’daar, which made them little better than spies. Gray had worked with them on numerous occasions, and didn’t think they would willingly betray their human clients, but he also knew that understanding nonhuman motives and mores was a tricky bit of guesswork at best. For a time, human warships had stopped carrying Agletsch advisors despite their obvious usefulness as translators and as sources of Sh’daar insight and galactography.

But Gray had insisted that Agletsch be brought along on this mission to assist in translating for the Sh’daar. The Joint Chiefs and President Koenig had agreed, but only if the beings were restricted to the Glothr vessel. That suited Gray just fine. He’d wanted someone over there that he could trust handling translations between humans and the Glothr anyway.

“The great moment is indeed here, Aar’mithdisch,” Gray replied. “I’d like to stress that it is vitally important that we have accurate translations of both sides of the negotiations. This may be the most important bit of diplomacy in my world’s history.” He grinned. “No pressure.”

“We do not understand this last comment,” the alien said. “The gas-filled portions of the Glothr vessel maintain an internal pressure of—”

“Never mind, never mind,” Gray said. “It was just a humorous expression.”

The Agletsch’s four weirdly stalked eyes twitched in complicated patterns, a rapid semaphore of sorts. Gray still couldn’t read the emotional overtones that eye movements conveyed to other Agletsch. No doubt, they had the same difficulty understanding human facial expressions, like the grin he’d just tossed into the conversation when he’d said “no pressure.” The Agletsch built very good electronic translators, but no translation system or artificial language could possibly take into account all of the subtle differences among cultures, biologies, and worldviews.

Considering how truly alien different species were when compared to one another, it was a wonder anyone could understand anything that another species was trying to say.

“We translate, Admiral Gray. Accurately … though we note that humans sometimes have trouble understanding other humans even when they share the same terrestrial language.”

“You understand us disturbingly well,” Gray said.

The being responded with a dip in two of its eyestalks—a gesture, Gray assumed, of agreement or, possibly, one simply of acknowledgement. Two more Agletsch materialized alongside the first, and the three of them appeared to be in close conversation among themselves.

“Look what just dropped in,” McKennon said, nodding toward the front of the room. The image of another being had just materialized. It looked like a stack of starfish three meters tall, smaller at the top, larger—almost a meter across—at the bottom. Several skinny arms with multiple branchings, like the branches of a tree, emerged from different points along and around that body, while eyes gleamed at the tips of myriad highly animated tendrils.

“Well, well,” Gray said, his eyes widening. “My software is flagging it as Ghresthrepni … one of the Adjugredudhra.”

“One of the senior spokesbeings for the Sh’daar,” McKennon said, nodding slowly. “And commander of the Ancient Hope.”

“Ah. That’s the ship that warped us in here. Big sucker.”

Like so much about this mission, not a great deal was known about the Adjugredudhra. They’d been prominent, Gray knew, among the ur-Sh’daar before the Transcendence … a species that had delved deeply into advanced nanotechnology. From what few records he’d seen, acquired during America’s visit to the N’gai Cluster twenty years before, the original Adjugredudhrans had developed nanotech to an astonishing degree, building smaller and smaller machines of greater and greater power, machines that allowed them to transform their own bodies molecule by molecule, to literally remake those bodies into any shape or form they desired.

But very few galactic cultures, it seemed, were completely monolithic. Some species organized along the lines of ant or bee colonies, perhaps, could maintain a laser-sharp focus in the way they saw themselves and the universe … but for most, sapient cultures usually contained diversity and variability, subcultures and factions, even misfits and renegades, refusers who did not drink too deeply of the background culture of their civilization. When the Transcendence came … the Schjaa Hok, the Time of Change, there were millions of refusers left behind. Their civilization collapsed, technologies were lost, and wars—survivor remnants squabbling in the ruins of a galactic civilization—destroyed what was left.

Over the course of thousands of years, however, those who remained pulled together and rebuilt much of what had been lost, including worldviews, traditions, and imperial ambitions … until the Sh’daar rose anew from the wreckage that the vanished ur-Sh’daar had left behind.

Another nonhuman being had appeared alongside the first … a huge squid standing on its head was Gray’s first thought, its tentacles spread across the floor holding semiupright a two-and-a-half-meter brown-mottled body curled at the end. A single saucer-sized eye—plus other sensory organs of more dubious uses—peered out from the base of the tentacle mass. Those tentacles flashed and shifted in their color patterns and textures; like the Glothr, they communicated with color and light in vivid visual displays.

Gray’s in-head database filled in the Agletsch name of the species: Groth Hoj. According to what humans had learned with the Koenig Expedition, the Groth Hoj had been masters of robotics, manufacturing massive robotic bodies for themselves … imitations of their natural bodies, at first, but then more and more outlandish machine designs.

Not all Groth Hoj had followed that route, which many apparently thought to be an evolutionary dead end. The refusers had stayed behind. And that must be who was here, today.

Another nonhuman appeared … but with this entity Gray drew a complete blank. He’d never seen anything remotely like it in any downloaded report or description of the N’gai civilizations.

His first impression was that it was a dinosaur—a long-necked sauropod—but it was held off the ground by six legs, not four. No tail, either, and the extra legs were unusual, set along the being’s center line, one behind, and one ahead; its walking pattern, Gray thought, would be … odd.

The hide looked like broken rock, the flanks like the side of a cliff, the neck like a cantilevered crane.

Most of all, the image he saw before him looked like it must be of a creature absolutely titanic in size, hundreds of meters long, perhaps, and massing tens of millions of tons. The head, broad, flattened, and wide, like the head of a hammerhead shark, swung ponderously at the end of that massive neck. Eyes—Gray thought they were eyes—glittered within the shadows underneath the head. A forest of what might have been a tangle of hair hung from the head’s underside like an unkempt beard. As the hairs twitched and writhed, Gray realized that they were manipulatory appendages. They almost hid a pulsing, V-shaped orifice that might be a mouth …

No. Not a mouth. A breathing orifice, perhaps? A creature that huge would have to eat continuously to feed that ponderous bulk, and a mouth that small just wouldn’t be up to the task. So how did the thing eat? And what?

For some reason, he really didn’t want to find out.

“What,” Gray said, “is that?”

“The Agletsch call it a Drerd,” a voice in his head said, and Gray realized it was Konstantin speaking to him through his implants, not McKennon.

“Hello, Konstantin,” he transmitted. “Getting settled into your new base of operations okay?”

“Everything is most satisfactory, Admiral,” the AI replied in its maddeningly calm and precise voice. “I have managed to interface with the Sh’daar systems of data storage and begun downloading information on their civilization. There are a number of species here in the files which we have not previously encountered.”

“I suppose that’s to be expected,” Gray replied. “When America paid her last visit here, we didn’t hang around for very long.”

“No. There are some hundreds of mutually alien species that evolved within the N’gai Cloud over the course of some billions of years. We knew of only a handful.”

Gray looked at the gathering aliens in the virtual meeting space and wondered why they had been chosen, as opposed to, say, the F’heen-F’haav symbiote pairs, or the sluglike Sjhlurrr.

It begged the question: who the hell was calling the shots for the Sh’daar?

Before he could figure that out, he realized the Drerd appeared to be speaking:

We give formal greeting to our visitors from the future …

The voice was a deep baritone and clearly human, or more likely an AI human avatar. According to data now appearing in side windows in Gray’s consciousness, the huge being was rumbling at infrasound frequencies, producing sound waves down around 8 or 10 Hertz, well below the 20 Hz limit of human hearing.

Ghresthrepni, the Adjugredudhran ship captain, responded, in a smoothly blended medley of clicks, chirps, trills, and tinkling bells.

We note, too, the being said in translation, the presence of an associate from our Collective’s future, whom the Agletsch name Glothr. We would know the reason for this conclave.

Lights shimmered and pulsed within the Glothr. We bring warning from your future, ran the translation.

We would hear, rumbled the Drerd, from the humans. It was they who requested this gathering of Mind.

“You’re up,” McKennon said.

“I guess so.” And Gray stood.

The virtual image around him shifted as he did so. Rather than in a classroom of some sort, he now stood on an endless flat plain. The sky remained the same—vast clots of stars, nebulae, and scattered artificial worlds. Now, however, a circle of beings stood on that plain, facing one another. The Drerd, Gray saw, was bigger than he’d even imagined—a ponderously mobile mountain, a mountainscape all in its own right. He was the only human, and the other species were represented by just one apiece. The Glothr, he saw, was standing a couple of meters to his right, an Agletsch just to his left, while the Drerd towered above him perhaps fifty meters ahead, on the other side of the circle.

The others—Adjugredudhra, Groth Hoj, and perhaps thirty or forty others—gathered around. He saw here several that he recognized but he’d not seen in the classroom simulation: the Baondyeddi, like massive, many-legged pancakes ringed about with eyes; the monstrous but beautiful Sjhlurrr, eight meters long and mottled gold and red; and a swarm of silvery spheres hovering together in midair, the intelligent component of the F’heen-F’haav hive-mind symbiosis.

So they are here. Interesting. Most—not all, but most—of the beings in that circle towered over Gray: the Groth Hoj by a meter or so, the Drerd by literally hundreds of meters. Individual F’heen were a few centimeters across, but that flashing, shifting sphere of hundreds of closely packed individuals was easily ten meters across. The Agletsch was smaller than a human, perhaps half of Gray’s height, and there was something to his right that looked at first glance like a glistening and flaccid pile of internal organs a couple of meters long and half a meter deep. Those few smaller beings, however, didn’t lessen at all the impact of standing with so many giants. Gray felt dwarfed, less than insignificant. It didn’t help that every single entity there belonged to a civilization more mature, more technologically advanced, than Earth’s. He felt like a child in a roomful of very tall, very old adults.

And how could it have been otherwise? Humankind had emerged from pre-technological darkness only the blink of an eye ago. It had been ten millennia since the invention of the plow, a mere six hundred and some years since the discovery of radio, and half that long since the first human faster-than-light voyage. The chance that any star-faring aliens encountered would be younger than humans was nil.

He thought of the assembly as the Sh’daar Council, though how accurate a description of the group that might be he had no idea.

“I have information for this Council,” Gray said, speaking through his cerebral implants. “Information acquired from the remote future—from a time twelve million years beyond my own epoch, and about eight hundred eighty-eight million years from this time we’re in now. We learned this from the Glothr, on the sunless world we call Invictus.

“And I think all of you, the Sh’daar Collective Council, need to know this …”

Chapter Six

2 November 2425

Virtual Reality

N’gai Cluster

1212 hours, TFT

Konstantin-2 fed recorded imagery to the Sh’daar Council as Gray continued to speak. The powerful AIs on board America had, 12 million years in Humankind’s future, tapped into the vast and intricate web of Glothr information networks. The information and imagery found there had been returned to Konstantin in the year 2425, analyzed, and translated. Those records, now imbedded within Konstantin-2’s memory, created a visual backdrop shared by all of the entities present as Gray spoke.

“This,” Gray said, “is the galaxy, my galaxy—we call it the Milky Way. This is what it looks like in my own time.”

The plain and its looming circle of giant beings had vanished. In its place, the Milky Way hung in silent, glowing splendor against Night Absolute. The central hub showed a faint reddish tinge while the spiral arms around it glowed faintly blue. From this vantage point, it was easy to see that the galaxy was, in fact, a barred spiral, its hub elongated in its ponderous revolution about the super-massive black hole at its heart.

Four hundred billion stars … forty billion Earthlike worlds … some millions of intelligent species, many with star-faring civilizations—all within that single soft glow of tangled, nebulae-knotted, spiraling starlight.

“A wise human named Sun Tzu once said, ‘Know your enemy,’” Gray told the others, “and so we humans have been learning as much as we can about the Sh’daar Collective. We know you evolved within this dwarf galaxy you call the N’gai Cluster, that your civilization was destroyed by the Schjaa Hok, the Transcendence, and that you rebuilt it from the ashes.

“We know that as the N’gai Cluster was devoured by the larger Milky Way, you spread out to create a new empire, one spanning both space and time … and that you were determined that the Transcendence would never again threaten your culture, or the cultures of other species that were interacting with you. We know that you found ways to travel from your epoch to mine, where you gathered many more species to your cause … the Turusch, the H’rulka, the Slan, and others. And when we humans refused what you offered—and what you demanded in return—you urged those species to attack us, either to force us into obedience, or to destroy us …”

Thunder rumbled, deep and insistent—the Drerd interrupting. You humans are balanced on the precipice, the translation informed him. You are closer to Schjaa Hok than you realize. If you fall, you threaten us all.

“We have never understood your fears about this,” Gray said. “If a single species in this entire, vast galaxy goes extinct—or if it enters its own transcendence and vanishes entirely—how does that threaten you?”

The spinning gateways give access not only to far expanses of space, another being—the one like a golden slug, the Sjhlurrr—reminded him, but to the deeps of time as well. Causality can be broken. Whole universes of creativity and creation, of experience, of suffering and of ecstasy, of Mind can be made void in an instant. What thinking being could not fear such an eventuality?

Spinning gateways. That must be what the Sh’daar called the TRGA cylinders. He felt the Agletsch within his implant, confirming his guess.

“There may be,” Gray said, “greater fears. We recently traveled twelve million years into our own future, and encountered the Glothr. We learned a great deal from them.

“And we learned about the end of galactic civilization … or at least of that aspect of civilization that includes the Sh’daar and Humankind.”

And the virtual image of the Milky Way … changed.

That vast whirlpool of hundreds of billions of suns, young and bright and vital, its spiral arms picked out by the long, knotted battlements and parapets of black dust and by the piercing gleam of young, hot stars, faded away to shreds and tatters, to be replaced by … something else, a pale shell of its former beauty. The mathematical perfection of those spiral arms had been torn apart, the nebulae devoured, the myriad stars vanished or somehow dimmed—a handful of stars surviving of the myriads visible before. The galaxy had become a wan, dim shadow of its former light and strength.

And at the galactic core something strange was visible, nestled in among the remnant suns. Something shadowy, with just a hint of golden light. It was difficult to see, difficult to interpret, to understand, but it looked like an immense translucent sphere fully ten thousand light years across, forged, perhaps, out of the clotted clouds of suns that had been there before.

A scant handful of species, according to the Glothr records, and including the Glothr themselves, were in full flight from the ravaged galaxy behind them, fleeing to other galaxies across the empty gulfs of space. A number of dark and frigid worlds—a fleet, a pack of Steppenwolf worlds—were fleeing out into darkness.

“We think,” Gray told the Council, “that what we’re seeing in there engulfing the galaxy’s central core is a full-blown Kardeshev III civilization … a galactic Dyson sphere.”

As he said this, Konstantin-2 shared with the Council the background information to what must have been untranslatable terms to the alien species:

In the mid-twentieth century, the Soviet scientist Nikolai Kardashev had lent his name to his proposed method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological development. A K-I civilization used all of the available energy of its home planet. A K-II used all of the energy from its star, and physicist Freeman Dyson had suggested how that might be possible: a hollow sphere, or, alternatively, a cloud of orbiting satellites, that collected all of the energy emitted by the civilization’s star.

Which meant that a K-III civilization would use all of the energy available within an entire galaxy.

When Gray suggested the possibility of a galactic-scale Dyson sphere—and as they accepted the AI’s data—he felt an uneasy stir move through his audience.

Why, the Groth Hoj asked him, should we fear this? This … event lies nearly a billion years in our future. And it could well be our own remote descendents who do this …

The ephemeral is correct, the Adjugredudhran said. Its branching arms gestured sharply. A mere four galactic rotations is a brief space of time for a truly mature civilization.

The being’s use of the word ephemeral almost jolted Gray out of the simulation. How long did the Adjugredudhra live?

And that question raised another. Presumably, they possessed long life spans—possibly even functional immortality—because they’d learned how to manipulate their own genome. But genetics was one of the proscribed technologies—the “G” in “GRIN,” knowledge that could lead to the Tech Singularity. Supposedly, the Adjugredudhra, like the rest of the Sh’daar, were doing everything in their power to avoid another one.

Were all of the members of the Sh’daar Collective hypocrites on such an astronomical scale?

That thought disturbed him even as he answered their question. “Eight hundred seventy-six million years is more like three galactic rotations, not four,” Gray said. “A mere instant!” He meant the statement as a joke, but sensed a kind of impact, an increasing sense of unease, among the alien listeners. Maybe they did casually think on a scale of hundreds of millions of years. “And in my time, my epoch, we might be seeing the first arrival of the galactic Dyson sphere makers. We believe them to be the Rosette Aliens.”

At Gray’s mental signal, Konstantin-2 loaded another set of images into the collective, virtual consciousness—images originally returned to Earth from the heart of the Omega Centauri star cluster. “A lot of ephemeral lives were lost,” he said, “getting this information.”

Konstantin was showing the gathered beings images collected by America, and by various survey ships and probes sent into the cluster’s heart. The six black holes the Council were seeing—cosmologists were now certain—were the far-future embers of the Six Suns of the remote past.

The beings gathered about the virtual circle stared up, with wildly different sensory organs, into utter strangeness. Not all of them had eyes … but the imagery had been made available in a wide range of formats.

The Six Suns all were hot, young stars, each some forty times the mass of Earth’s sun. Such large stars were profligate and short-lived. They burned through their stores of nuclear fuel in just tens of millions of years before ending their relatively brief lives as Type II supernovae and collapsing into black holes. The various star-faring beings around him had to know what these images implied, but he said it aloud anyway.

“This is the ultimate fate of your Six Suns,” Gray told them. “Six black holes spinning in a rosette. Those masses, rotating that quickly, distort spacetime in the same way as the TRGAs … what you call the Spinning Gateways.”

Gray knew, though, that the most intriguing part of the images humans had recorded weren’t the black holes themselves, but what was within the central opening at the Rosette’s heart: starscapes.

Different starscapes.

They changed with the changing angle of the recording sensors as they passed the opening, and Gray thought about how a slight change in the angle of approach through a TRGA cylinder could change your destination in both time and space. Here, one view of a sparseness of stars—a stellar desert—gave way to the teeming myriads of suns at the heart of a cluster or a galaxy, which in turn gave way to tangled, knotted curtains of nebulae … to the emptiness of intergalactic space … to a view of a binary star from relatively close … to a view of a spiral galaxy—quite possibly the Milky Way—seen in all of its spectacular beauty from Outside.

Some of those different views, those different realities, were alien in the extreme. One appeared to be a realm of searing, white-hot energy … the core of a sun, perhaps … or the chaotic incandescence of an instant after the big bang … or even a cosmos of completely different laws and makeup.

Cosmologists studying the changing scenes had concluded that each different starscape was looking into a different universe—alternate, parallel realities, some very like this one, some completely other.

“We believe the Rosette Aliens came through this gateway,” Gray told the assembly. “They might be from the remote future. More likely they’re from an alternative universe, a different reality. Some of our cosmologists have speculated that they’re from a universe that is nearing the end of its lifetime, a universe in the final eons of cold, entropic decay. If so, the Rosette Aliens might be seeking a younger, healthier universe. They would be migrating here to escape their dying cosmos.

“But we don’t know. We haven’t been able to establish communications with them. We don’t know what they are, what they’re thinking, where they’re from. They may be so far advanced that they literally do not, cannot notice us.

“Some human xenosophontologists have begun speculating,” Gray went on, “about the galactic Dyson sphere we glimpsed in the far future … eight hundred eighty-eight million years after this epoch you inhabit here. It seems statistically unlikely that we’re dealing with two Kardashev-III species here—one entering my time as the Rosette Aliens, and a different one building a galaxy-sized Dyson sphere just twelve million years later. If these two … manifestations are in fact the same species, we need to confront them before they become well-established and begin cannibalizing the entire galaxy. This is completely beyond the scope and capabilities of Humankind. But if it is of interest to the Sh’daar, perhaps an alliance between humans and the Sh’daar is a possibility after all.”

Gray hated saying that, hated the necessity of stating it. He’d spent most of his adult life fighting the Sh’daar. He’d started off as a fighter pilot off the America, then gone on to flying a console at Navy HQ Command. He’d served as CAG on board the Republic, as skipper of the Nassau and then as XO back on board the America once more, before eventually moving up to becoming America’s CO.

And now he was a fleet admiral in command of the America battlegroup, with orders from the president himself to forge an alliance with the federation of alien cultures he’d been fighting now for twenty … no, twenty-four years.

No … he didn’t like that one damned bit.

Hell, the whole point of the war had been to maintain Earth’s sovereignty against a coalition of beings determined to incorporate Humankind into their own order. But now here he was, with orders from President Koenig to explore the possibility of recruiting those same beings into an alliance with Earth. Could the Sh’daar be trusted? Could they even be understood?

Were humans going to lose their independence after all, after nearly sixty years of bitter and bloody conflict?

It tore at him, knowing so many of his soldiers—so many of his friends—had died because of these beings, and now he was essentially here, begging for their help.

He’d stopped speaking, his message delivered, and he realized that all of the gathered aliens were discussing it now with considerable animation. Gray found that he was unable to follow more than a fraction of what was being said. It was like being in a conversation where everyone was talking at once, and hearing only a word here and there.

He found the Agletsch’s channel. “Aar’mithdisch? I’m not following the translation.”

“The human brain has limitations,” she replied. “It is unable to follow multiple threads, it seems.”

“Are you telling me these beings can?”

“To an extent. All have been enhanced to one extent or another. You will be able to use the translation software to pick out separate threads and hear them in isolation, perhaps at a later time.”

Which didn’t help him understand what was going on now.

He tried to tune in on different threads.

We do not know if these images represent non-Sh’daar manipulation of the galaxy …

We do not know that these images represent reality …

If the Glothr flee …

The ephemerals distort the truth …

… has nothing to do with us …

… ephemerals do not …

… a billion years …

… afraid …

“What are they saying?” McKennon asked on a private channel, and for the first time, Gray realized that she had been experiencing this virtual reality as well, even though he didn’t see her avatar here.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Our translation expert says human brains aren’t good enough for us to join in.”

“Some Sh’daar brains and nervous systems have been artificially enhanced,” she told him. “The Adjugredudhra … the Zhalleg …”

“I thought these species were all Refusers?” Gray replied, a petulant edge to his mental voice. “No GRIN technologies, no genetics, no robotics—”

“As far as we’ve been able to determine,” McKennon told him, “that was almost never an absolute for them. If humans gave up all technology, that would include fire, sharpened sticks, and the hand ax. The most virulent Luddite wouldn’t demand that.”

“I suppose not. It just seems … I don’t know … hypocritical, I guess, for them to demand we give up certain technologies while they continue using them.”

“They’re also alien, Admiral. By definition, that means they don’t see things the same way we do.”

“I’ve heard that one before.” He laughed. “And I still think that’s a piss-poor excuse that explains nothing.”

“Well, excuse me …”

“Oh, I wasn’t picking on you. They have different worldviews, a different context. I get that. But if this were a virdrama, having the villains do something weird just because they’re alien wouldn’t cut it.”

“Maybe the problem is that this isn’t a virdrama,” she told him. “Real life is never as neatly ordered—or as explicable—as fiction.”

… the Six Suns of the future …

… the Spinning Gateways …

… if the ephemerals upset the balance of …

… we must not …

… they must not …

“Are you recording all of this?” Gray asked McKennon.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“I am. It’s good to have a backup, though. You may be picking up pieces that my hardware misses.”

“Good thought.”

“Konstantin should be able to untangle it all later. But I do wish we knew what the argument was about now.”

“Ask the Agletsch.”

“Damn it. Of course …” He shifted channels. “Aar’mithdisch? What are they arguing about? Explain it for my poor, underdeveloped human brain.”

“They do not argue … not precisely. There is doubt that the imagery you bring from the remote future represents what is really happening. Two—the Adjugredudhra and the Baondyeddi—think it likely that the galactic Dyson sphere you’ve imaged here is in fact something built by the farfuture descendents of the Sh’daar Collective. If that is true, of course, there is nothing about which they need to be concerned … yes-no?”

“The Glothr records show Sh’daar species fleeing the galaxy.”

“The term ‘Sh’daar’ may have no meaning—or pertinence—in another four Galactic rotations.

“Too, others continue to insist that a billion years is too long an expanse of time for anyone to worry about what lies beyond. Those inhabited worlds fleeing into intergalactic space could be the future equivalent of Refusers, for example, or a defeated faction … or almost anything else at all. Nearly a billion years is a very long period of time, in which cultures will likely evolve and change out of all recognition.”

“How … ephemeral of them …”

“Some Sh’daar species are extremely long-lived,” the Agletsch said. “They tend to take what you humans call the long view … and with good reason. But most feel the problems of today are more than enough to occupy their full attention … yes-no?”

“Time travel rather puts a different spin on things, though,” Gray pointed out. “What the Sh’daar do here, in the N’gai Cluster, has spread to my own time.”

“Of course. But of greater moment … the technically advanced species of the remote future may be able to travel back in time and affect what happens here. The Glothr, clearly, can do this. You humans have done it, by means of the TRGA cylinders. What terrifies the decision makers of the Collective is the possibility that someone … you, the Glothr … the Rosette Aliens will come back to this time or before and wipe out all that they have built here.”

“Why? What are they building that is so damned important?” He meant the words lightly, a kind of joke.

The Agletsch liaison answered him, though. “They seek to undo the Technological Singularity, which destroyed their former totsch.”

The Agletsch word was not easily translated. According to Konstantin-2’s database, though, it carried elements of the words “glory,” “reputation,” and “effectiveness.” Gray decided that a good fit might be the Asian concept of face.

Could that be the answer? The Sh’daar had set out on their anti-singularity jihad because they were embarrassed? Because they felt they’d lost face?

It didn’t seem reasonable. And yet, knowing the human causes for so much of their own history, maybe that shouldn’t be surprising.

“The war itself may be an emergent phenomenon,” Konstantin-2 whispered in Gray’s thoughts, almost as though reading them.

“What do you mean?”

“The Collective consists of several diverse species, each with its own agenda … and with numerous individual members of each species with their own goals and desires, all interacting with one another in essentially unpredictable ways. The pro-singularity Sh’daar who attacked us upon our arrival are a case in point.”

“So?”

“Emergent behavior is defined as a larger pattern or behavior arising from interactions among smaller or simpler entities which may not, themselves, display that behavior. Mind arising from trillions of neural synaptic connections would be one such. Life itself, emerging from the associated cells of an organism, is another.”

“Okay, okay. I get it. But war?”

“It seems evident that no one of the Sh’daar species rules or dominates the others. All do fear a repeat of their singularity event, however, and seek to prevent this. Their interaction with one another, however, might have led to a social acceptance of warfare as a means to an end, and the attitudes of other species would reinforce the emerging group ethic.”

“Like a lynch mob,” Gray said slowly.

“Precisely. One human alone might be unwilling to execute another human, but a large group, with the members exciting one another, would not hesitate. Humans have demonstrated this principle time and time again, in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in the Chinese Hegemony …”

“So what do we do about it?”

“Unknown. Improved lines of communication will help.”

“Of course it would. The problem is we can’t even understand them now.”

The ephemerals try to deceive us …

The ephemerals are of no consequence …

We should investigate the Rosette intelligence …

Who’d said that? Gray checked the datastream, and had Konstantin-2 tease out the tagline on the statement. It was the Sjhlurrr.

The Sjhlurrr posed an interesting problem for those studying the Sh’daar Collective of species, Gray thought. According to the data acquired twenty years ago, the red-golden slugs appeared to be less psychologically attached to a particular body image than were humans. Evidently, they’d used advanced genetic techniques to alter their ponderous and often inconvenient forms, transferring their considerable intellects into other, smaller and more mobile organic bodies in myriad shapes and sizes.

“I wonder,” McKennon said, “if that’s the Sjhlurrr’s real shape.”

She seemed to be reading his thoughts. “I thought the Refusers rejected the idea of genetic manipulation.”

“Some did. But just as not all of the ur-Sh’daar went along with the technologies that kicked off their singularity, not all members of a species buy into a single ideology or meme. Think of how diverse human beliefs are.”

“I guess so. It’s easy to see all aliens as alike …”

“There are some. One F’heen is pretty much identical to every other F’heen in its swarm, both genetically and in its worldview. They form telepathic group minds, so they kind of have to all look at the world the same way, not only within their home swarm, but among all swarms. But for most other species? No, they’re as much individuals within their own groups as are humans.”

Gray thought about that statement for a moment. While he agreed in principle, he was not completely convinced. For a long time, humans had assumed that the near-mythic Sh’daar were a single alien species, the monolithic power behind an alliance of galactic species within the Tprime epoch that they’d set to attacking humans. When the America battlegroup had first traveled back in time to the N’gai Cluster, Humankind had discovered that the Sh’daar were, in fact, an assembly of several dozen star-faring species working together … an empire of sorts, spanning both space and time, united in the need to stop other species from entering their own technological singularities.

And something about that idea simply did not make sense. Gray felt like he was tantalizingly close to seeing a larger picture, a motive behind Sh’daar decisions and actions, something that humans had not yet grasped. It had to do with what McKennon had just said about diversity within the separate species … but he couldn’t quite grasp it.

With a mental shrug, he decided to look at it later. Maybe Konstantin-2 would be able to help pin down what was bothering him.

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